There’s a Seinfeld episode where George Costanza tells his black boss he looks like Sugar Ray Leonard. His boss is offended, and George then spends the rest of the episode desperately trying to prove he isn’t prejudiced.
“I suppose we all look alike to you, right, Costanza?” his boss tells him.
“No, not a racial thing,” George insists. “There really is a resemblance.”
When he asks his coworkers to back him up, none of them do, because they don’t want to be accused of racism. So George spends the rest of the episode frantically trying to prove he’s not racist by hunting down a black man willing to pretend to be his friend to prove he’s not racist.
At Syracuse University on Tuesday, Joe Biden managed to revive this racist trope and somehow walk away thinking he’d charmed the room.
Biden returned to his alma mater for the unveiling of his official portrait, now permanently displayed in the Law Library Reading Room of the university’s law school, for some reason. The portrait, for the record, was not of an autopen. It was a real painting of a real man who spent four years steering the country into a ditch.
During his remarks, Biden called out the law school’s leadership by name from the podium. Then he spotted Jeffrey M. Scruggs, chairman of the Syracuse University Board of Trustees, and pulled a Costanza… only worse.
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“I always want to turn around to one guy and say… ‘Barack, what are you doing?'” Biden said, as the audience laughed. He then waved Scruggs up to the stage and added, “I feel like he should be standing on the right and I should be standing on the left.”
Great joke, Joe. One problem: Scruggs doesn’t look like Obama. At all.
“I always want to turn around to one guy and say, ‘Barack, what are you doing?’”
Biden pulls Syracuse University Board of Trustees Chairman Jeffrey Scruggs into the spotlight mid-speech, saying he looks like former President Obama during the unveiling of the 46th president’s… pic.twitter.com/ksf5fc0nP7
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 14, 2026
The moment went viral almost instantly. Social media is split in the usual ways. Critics said it was another entry on Biden’s long list of cognitive stumbles, while defenders insisted it was clearly a harmless joke. But there’s a third option: maybe it was just racist.
And this is not a one-time slip. The man has a decades-long track record of making racist comments.
Back in 1977, Biden spoke out against school desegregation in a way that left no ambiguity. “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point,” he said.
In 2007, Biden launched his first bid for president by describing his future running mate as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” Obama was not, of course, the first black presidential candidate. Shirley Chisholm ran in 1972. Jesse Jackson ran in 1984 and 1988.
In 2019, at an Iowa event hosted by the Asian and Latino Coalition, Biden implied that black children are all poor. “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” he said, apparently catching himself mid-sentence and somehow making it worse.
And then there’s the 2020 interview with Charlamagne tha God in which he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Defenders will call Tuesday’s moment a harmless joke. Critics will call it a gaffe. Both camps are missing the larger point. Joe Biden has been showing us exactly who he is for nearly 50 years. Tuesday at Syracuse was just the latest reminder of who Joe Biden really is.
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