During his meeting with the President of Poland on Tuesday, President Biden jokingly remarked that he had considered changing his last name to include "ski" or "o" so that he could better blend in with the Polish and Italian population of the area where he used to live in Delaware.
On the occasion of the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden met with Poland's President Andrzej Duda and afterward discussed his own family move.
As a young man, I was born in a coal town of Scranton, Pa., in northeastern Pennsylvania, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Then when coal died, we moved down to Delaware, to a town called Claymont, Del., which was a working-class town, Biden recalled. But everyone in town was either Polish or Italian. I grew up feeling self-conscious my name didnt end in an s-k-i or an o.'
Biden has often made claims of affiliation with certain racial, national, or minority groups, and this comment was no different.
Back in October, Biden was addressing a crowd in Puerto Rico and stated that he "was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically," which is contrary to the reality that only about 2,000 people of Puerto Rican descent lived in Delaware when Biden began his political career in the 1970s, as reported by the New York Post.
In September 2021, Joe Biden declared to Jewish leaders that he recalled being at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 after the most severe anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, in which 11 people were killed. However, the synagogue contested this, and the White House later conceded that Biden was, in fact, referring to a phone call he had with the synagogue's rabbi in 2019.
At the start of 2020, Biden informed students at Georgia's historically black colleges that he had been arrested several times while demonstrating for civil rights - a claim for which there is no proof.
While running for President, Joe Biden asserted that his upbringing was heavily influenced by the black church and that he was a teen civil rights organizer at Union Baptist Church in Wilmington. Members who had been with the church for a while later declared that Biden never went to worship or engaged in organizing demonstrations as a young person.
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