Obama Uses N-Word, Discusses Societal Racism On WTF with Marc Maron
Today, Marc Maron released the episode of his podcast where he spoke with President Barack Obama. The interview, which was conducted Friday, occurred less than two days after the deadly shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, where a 21-year-old white man influenced by white supremacist organizations shot and killed nine black people in a historically African-American church.
Much of the conversation focused on race. “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,” Obama told Maron.
Yet despite the progress, Obama noted that the “legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination” remains “part of our DNA that’s passed on.”
Obama briefly addressed racist language and emphasized that words alone are not the problem. “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public,” he told Maron. “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.”
He also addressed the issue of gun control, which always emerges as a full-fledged debate following a mass shooting. “The question is, is there a way of accommodating that legitimate set of traditions,” referring to those who were raised with guns and hunting as a part of their culture. He said the goal is to preserve those traditions “with some common-sense stuff that prevents a 21-year-old who is angry about something, or confused about something, or is racist, or is, you know, deranged from going into a gun store and suddenly is packing and can do enormous harm?”
The full episode is available on WTFpod.com.
