Biden referred to a pitcher as 'great negro,' term Obama banned in 2016

During a speech Thursday at an Arlington National Cemetery Veterans Day event, President Joe Biden used the word "Negro" to describe famed black pitcher of the past Satchel Paige.

"I know you’re a little younger than I am," he told attendees. "But I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro at the time, pitcher in the Negro leagues, went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, major league baseball, after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

"And Satchel Paige, on his 47th birthday, pitched a win against Chicago. And all the press went in and said, 'Satch, it's amazing, 47 years old. No one’s ever, ever pitched a win at age 47. How do you feel about being 47?' He said, 'Boys, that's not how I look at it.'

"They said, 'How do you look at it, Satch?' He said, 'I look at it this way: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?" said Biden. 

The anecdote about the pitcher's age was delivered in the context of acknowledging the 95th birthday of Donald Blinken, father to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary. 

Biden seemed to try to share the same story last month when visiting Pope Francis at the Vatican but use the term "famous African-American baseball player."

During Biden's vice presidency, Barack Obama signed a bill that banned the federal government from using the term 'negro,' replacing it with "African-American."

Months ahead of the 2020 election, former Trump political adviser Roger Stone referred to a radio host as a "negro" during an interview, prompting the host to write a blog post calling Stone's usage "offered an unfiltered, unvarnished one-sentence expression of how he saw the journalist interviewing him."

The host, Morris O'Kelly, characterized the term as a "low-calorie version of the n-word."