President Barack Obama’s glad he said what he said.

And he believes America proved his point on Monday: Even in the wake of an amateur white supremacist shooting nine African-Americans to death in a historically black church in the hopes of inciting a race war, we still struggle to have a genuine discussion about race in this country.


Aides said that walking into Marc Maron’s garage to tape a podcast on Friday, Obama knew he’d probably get asked about race, and he knew roughly what he wanted to say. When the taping ended, he could guess that most people would focus on the president of the United States, the nation’s black president, using the most racially charged word in the English language.

When the interview went live Monday morning, the news went everywhere: Obama said “nigger.”

The reaction, in Obama’s mind, is a good thing. Like a national experiment in abstract expressionism, the response it’s generated has shown him he was right in the point he was making about what’s wrong with how the country talks about race.

“Racism: We’re not cured of it,” Obama told Maron. “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 erase everything that happened two to 300 years earlier.”

Aides say he’s glad his language got a whole lot more people talking about what he had to say on race than they would have been otherwise — even if some of that reaction looks to the White House to be dumb and petty and shortsighted.

“Is the reaction all good? No, but that’s never the goal,” said Valerie Jarrett, an Obama senior adviser and friend who was in the room for the interview. “It was a really important point for people to hear. I think he’s glad that he said it. And he is encouraged that people were able to hear his broader message.”

The problem isn’t with what Obama said, said Rev. Al Sharpton — an Obama confidant who doesn’t use the word himself, but understood why his friend chose to. The problem is with people on both the left and right acting as if his saying the n-word was the real issue, instead of grasping his larger point, which is that racism has to a large extent gone underground, marked less by epithets than by more subtle attitudes and ideas.

“Some of the reaction is racist. Because they’re discussing this like it’s something that shouldn’t be discussed, which in itself is biased,” Sharpton said.

Obama will have more to say Friday, when he and Vice President Joe Biden fly to South Carolina to give the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was gunned down with his eight congregants during a Bible study. But for Monday, there was just that one word in the air.

The reaction didn’t surprise Obama, not after the past 6½ years. Not after living through a debate about his birth certificate that only the truly delusional would say wasn’t about his being black. Not after everything from Jeremiah Wright to the nooses that got tweeted at him as soon as he opened his @POTUS Twitter account.

This is what happens when the country’s first black president makes some of his most extensive, unguarded comments about race: The focus is on a single word of a two-minute answer.

At his daily news briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest answered question after question about that word: no, this wasn’t a precooked White House plan to inject it into the conversation; yes, the president used the word in his autobiography, but hasn’t in Earnest’s presence. No questions about what Obama was actually talking about, and just a few basic follow-ups about what any of this might have to do with the shootings at Mother Emanuel — but only in relation to whether that’s what made Obama bubble up and use this one particular word, as if he had spit it out in anger in Maron’s garage (which he did not).

“Let’s not act like he used the n-word in a sanitized way. He used it in the way it was meant to be used, which is as a racist, negative word,” Sharpton said.

Once again, Sharpton said, this proves why Obama’s always so careful in what he says on race, why he so slowly chose the words he ad-libbed into his statement about the Charleston shootings when speaking at the White House the morning after. Hillary Clinton could speak Saturday morning from the same microphone at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco that Obama had on Friday afternoon and talk in depth about black poverty and asthma rates, voting rights and racism embedded in the judicial system, and most people paid attention instead to what she said about gun control. Obama can’t say the word “black” without the country erupting.

“The president could say tomorrow, ‘I’m going to wear a black suit,’ and by nightfall, people would be saying, ‘Well, you know, he’s talking about black suits, and that’s just a way of saying he’s African-American and against white people,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

As for the people who thought that Obama’s election would help get America to stop living out a William Faulkner novel, the president was never one of them himself, Jarrett said.

“Is it realistic to expect hearts to change rapidly? In some cases, yes. People have life experiences that are transformative,” she said. “But change often takes time. I don’t think simply by electing an African-American the president of the United States, you expect with a magic wand for generations of discrimination or racism to suddenly be erased.”

Being both the vessel of so much racial hope and the spark of so much racial hate isn’t easy for Obama, Jarrett said, but he knew what he was getting into when he became president.

“The messenger is always a target of venom by those who are resisting change,” Jarrett said.

Cleaver also doesn’t use the n-word, and said if someone uses it in front of him, “they’re going to have a problem.” But what people should really be thinking about, Cleaver said, is how much embedded racism there is in many people who take such pride in never saying it. What about the people who come to congressional hearings and talk about people living in public housing because they don’t want to work, or using their food stamps to buy Chivas Regal?

And that’s when they’re being subtle.

“The fact that people are outraged that he used the word is also significant because it demonstrates in many instances exactly what the president was saying,” Cleaver said. “There are a lot of other words that people use that sound perfectly acceptable that send dangerous racist signals.”