US President Joe Biden has been slammed for using a derogatory term to describe his senior adviseer and Director of the Office of Public Engagement Cedric Richmond, who is black. The Democrat made the statement during a briefing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) where he discussed Hurricane Ida that left more than one million people without power in the state of Louisiana.
"I'm here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond", the president said.
When being used to describe a child or a younger person, the term boy is not derogatory, however, it is inappropriate when being used to describe a black man. During and after enslavement the word was used to suggest that African Americans were not equal members of society. Although the US Supreme Court stated that the use of "boy" on its own doesn't mean that its discriminatory, the word itself is not benign.
Biden was harshly criticised for his description of his senior aide with some users accusing POTUS of racism.
Others contended that the accusations against the Democrat were a stretch, noting that the president made a mistake and wanted to use boy as an exclamation or to express endearment towards his colleague.
Still others said this was not the first time that Biden has used questionable terms and imagined how the press would have reacted if the word was used by a Republican.
As mentioned earlier, accusations of discrimination have plagued Joe Biden over the course of his career. His running mate and now Vice President Kamala Harris drew attention to Biden's opposition to busing, a 1970's government programme aimed at ending racial segregation in the United States, during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Long before that, he raised eyebrows when complimenting then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man", Biden said in 2007.
Yet, the Democrat's biggest flop is probably the gaffe he made in 2019 when he told a group of Asian and Hispanic voters:
"Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids".