US President Barack Obama Invokes Slur to Make Point on Race Monday June 22,2015

 

It was a single word, just six letters long, but one that has not been spoken by an American president in public for generations.

President Barack Obama invoked the word "nigger" in a podcast interview released Monday June 22,2015 to drive home his point that slavery still "casts a long shadow" on American life. But in the process, he touched a raw nerve in a country struggling to confront racism and hatred days after nine black parishioners were killed during Bible study in a South Carolina church.

"We're not cured of it," Obama said of racism during an interview for a "WTF with Marc Maron" podcast. "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."

For part of the hourlong conversation with Maron, the nation's first black president patiently explained that race relations had improved in his lifetime. But in also acknowledging that racism was still deeply embedded in the United States as a "part of our DNA," he turned to a racially-fraught word. His use of it quickly became the focus of daylong commentary online and on cable news.