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| President Barack Obama steps from Marine One in Pasadena, Calif., Friday, June 19, 2015, en route to tape a podcast interview with comedian Marc Maron. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- President Barack Obama says the history of slavery and
segregation is "still part of our DNA" in the United States, even if
racial epithets no longer show up in polite conversation. He uttered the
N-word in making his point.
In an interview,
Obama talked about the debates over race and guns that have erupted
after the arrest of a white man in the racially motivated shooting
deaths of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina.
"Racism,
we are not cured of it," Obama said. "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."
Obama's
remarks came during an interview out Monday with comedian Marc Maron
for his popular podcast, where coarse language is often part of the
discussion. The president uttering a racial slur aloud stirred
controversy, especially on social media, and White House spokesman Josh
Earnest said later Monday that wasn't surprising.
Obama
didn't plan in advance to use the word to be provocative, Earnest said,
but was simply making a point during a casual, free-flowing interview.
He said he didn't recall ever hearing the president say the racial slur
aloud before, but noted that it did appear in his book, "Dreams from My
Father."
The White House on Monday said Obama,
would travel to Charleston on Friday to deliver the eulogy for the Rev.
Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the Emanuel AME Church and one of the
victims of last week's shooting. First lady Michelle Obama and Vice
President Joe Biden also plan to attend. The Obamas knew the slain
pastor, who also was a state senator and an early Obama supporter in the
2008 presidential campaign.
In the interview,
Obama said while attitudes about race have improved significantly since
he was born to a white mother and black father, the "legacy of slavery,
Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, that
casts a long shadow and that's still part of our DNA that's passed on."
Obama
also expressed frustration that "the grip of the NRA on Congress is
extremely strong" and prevented gun control from advancing in Congress
after 20 children and six educators were massacred in a Connecticut
elementary school in 2012.
"I will tell you,
right after Sandy Hook, Newtown, when 20 6-year-olds are gunned down,
and Congress literally does nothing - yes, that's the closest I came to
feeling disgusted," he said. "I was pretty disgusted."
He
said it's important to respect that hunting and sportsmanship are
important to a lot of gun-owning Americans. "The question is just is
there a way of accommodating that legitimate set of 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 deranged from
going into a gun store and suddenly is packing, and can do enormous
harm," Obama said in a reference to suspect Dylann Storm Roof, whose
purported 2,500-word hate-filled manifesto talked about white supremacy.
Roof faces nine counts of murder in connection with Wednesday's
shooting.
Obama sat for the interview Friday
in Maron's Los Angeles garage studio - close to where the president
attended Occidental College - and seemed to marvel at the absurdity of
it. "If I thought to myself that when I was in college that I'd be in a
garage a couple miles away from where I was living, doing an interview
as president, with a comedian ... it's not possible to imagine," he
said. But he said he did the interview because he wants to reach a
nontraditional audience and "break out of these old patterns that our
politics has fallen into" where "it's not this battle in a steel cage
between one side and another."
With the
campaign to replace him heating up, Obama said he thinks he would be a
better candidate if he were running again, because although he's slowed
down a little bit, "I know what I'm doing and I'm fearless."
"I've
screwed up. I've been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls. And I
emerged and I lived. And that's always such a liberating feeling," he
said.
