President Obama spoke with Marc Maron on the popular podcast, WTF, on Sunday night. While discussing the issue of racism, the president said:
“Racism, we are not cured of it and it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n****r 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, erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
Fox News, of course, spent the day bloviating about whether or not Obama “lowered the standard” of the office of President of the United States.
Fox’s Bret Baier answered by?saying that it was President Obama’s “prerogative to say those things when talking about racism from his personal knowledge and” that he has “a unique perspective, obviously, as the first African-American president.”
Elizabeth Hasselbeck continued to be offended, however, saying:
“I think many people are wondering if it’s only there that he would say it and not, perhaps, in a State of the Union or more public address.”
No word on who those “many people” are or what would lead them to such a ridiculous question.
Even more offensive, Fox’s America’s News allowed one contributor, Deneen Borelli, to insist that President Obama really “dragged in the gutter speak of rap music,” as if rappers are the only people to ever use the word.
Of course, Borelli also had to include a whole discussion about how divisive our president has been, saying:
“It’s all a distraction, a grand distraction, to take away from people uniting (in South Carolina), and now the ?President-in-chief, the rapper-in-chief, is now further dividing our country. I find it outrageous.”
Do they know that racism existed before 2008, when Barack Obama became the first African-American president?
Borelli also insisted several times that President Obama failed to talk about efforts toward racial unity and painted a picture of the United States as “the most racist country in the world.”
She must have missed the rest of Obama’s statement, which pointed out that:
“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, [but] the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination [still casts] a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”
For all of this insistence that President Obama has just destroyed the integrity of the office of president by using the n-word, I have to wonder if anyone has let Hasselbeck or Borelli know that twelve men who held that office prior owned slaves. I’ll bet the word has been used in the White House long before now, and with far more malicious intentions than President Obama had in discussing racism on WTF.
