In a podcast interview released Monday, President Barack Obama invoked the most controversial racial slur to make a case that the United States has not yet overcome its legacy of slavery and racism.
"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," Obama said in an episode of the Marc Maron "WTF" podcast, recorded last week in Los Angeles and released Monday.
"It's not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don't overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior," he continued. "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."
The discussion was prompted by last week's killings at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., in which nine black church members were killed by a racially motivated white man.
Obama repeated previous comments that "no other advanced nation on Earth tolerates multiple shootings on a regular basis and considers it normal."
The president said he doesn't foresee Congress taking any action on the issue of gun control - not until "the American public feels a sufficient sense of urgency and they say to themselves, 'This is not normal, this is something that we can change, and we're going to change it.'"
"The grieving that the country feels is real, the sympathy, the prioritizing, comforting the families, all that is important," he said.
"It's not enough just to feel bad, there are actions that could be taken to make events like this less likely. One of those actions we could take is to enhance basic, common-sense, gun safety laws that, by the way, the majority of gun owners support."
Obama questioned if there is "a way of accommodating that legitimate set of [gun owning] 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," referring to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof, who allegedly wrote a 2,500-word manifesto on white supremacist ideologies.
The interview took place on Friday in the garage studio of Maron, who is a comedian known for incorporating crude language into his interviews. Obama remarked on the absurdity of doing an interview only a couple miles from where he attended Occidental College. "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.
One of the reasons he asked Maron to do the interview was because he wanted 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."
Listen to President Obama's interview with Maron here.
