President Barack Obama intentionally used a racial slur in a podcast interview discussing racism, and the right is going ballistic. Fortunately, liberals, and even a few conservatives, school them.
Conservatives, many who spent the latter part of last week attempting to downplay the overriding racist element in the Charleston, South Carolina historically Black church massacre that left nine people, all Black, dead, have found a tool to attack the left: the “N” word. More specifically, President Barack Obama‘s use of the “N” word in a podcast interview published this morning with veteran comedian, actor, director, and host of his own podcast, Marc Maron.
Speaking about the level of racism in America and where the country has gone, President Obama said,
“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
Here’s video with a clip of the unedited audio:
The 53-year old Democrat, the nation’s first Black president, also told Maron, “I always tell young people, in particular, do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America, unless you’ve lived through being a black man in the 1950s or ’60s or ’70s. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours.”Â
And he also noted that America’s “legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination in almost every institution of our lives—that casts a long shadow. Thats still part of our DNA. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two-to-three hundred years prior.”
On Twitter, conservatives expressed their usual faux outrage:
Meanwhile, liberals were quick to point out the right-wing hypocrisy:
Even some conservatives opposed their fellow conservatives’ “outrage”:
You can hear the entire podcast at Marc Maron’s WTF website, and see photos taken during the interview on a special site created just for this event.
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Image of President Obama and Marc Maron in Maron’s garage by Pete Souza via Instagram