For a frustrated US President Barack Obama, last week’s slaughter of nine black churchgoers proves once again that the US has yet to exorcise its racist demons.
However, just to underline the point, he showed in remarks released on Monday that he is not afraid to use a term that most Americans would blanch at in an effort to convey his frustration.
“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,” the US’ first black president said.
“It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination,” he said. “Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
Speaking to online radio broadcast WTF with Marc Maron, Obama put last week’s murderous rampage in a black church by a suspected young white supremacist in the context of US history.
“It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours, and that opportunities have opened up, and that attitudes have changed,” he said.
“What is also true is the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” Obama said. “We’re not cured of it.”
Such an analysis might seem obvious in the wake of more than a year of racially charged protests triggered by alleged police abuses and the deaths of unarmed black men.
It is nevertheless very unusual for a US politician to speak so frankly on a topic so many Americans are uncomfortable with. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Monday that Obama did not regret using the term.
Obama has addressed the issue of racism before, especially in his speeches and writings before he became president.
During his 2008 campaign, amid scrutiny of provocative statements by the pastor of a black church Obama had attended, he said: “The issue of racism cannot be ignored.”
Since coming to office, Obama has disappointed some with cautious, impersonal responses to incidents that black Americans felt showed their ongoing persecution.
However, he got very personal in addressing the case of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by a neighborhood watchman, saying Martin “could have been me 35 years ago.”
And before last week’s slaughter in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the president had begun to identify more closely and personally with the civil rights cause.
A high point for supporters came in March when Obama attended a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of a brutally repressed civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.
“Our march is not yet over,” he said.
Obama returned to this theme, and to his own experiences of race and identity as the son of an absent Kenyan father and a white American mother, in the interview with Maron.
The president described how growing up, he had to learn “I don’t have to be one way to be both an African American, but also somebody who affirms the white side of my family.”
However, now the evolution he wants to see is in broader society.
“And so what I tried to describe in the Selma speech that I gave... was a notion that progress is real and we have to take hope from that progress, but what is also real is that the march isn’t over and the work is not yet completed,” he said. “And then our job is to try, in very concrete ways, to figure out what more can we do.”
Public revulsion at the suppression of the Selma march led to the Voting Rights Act, a victory in the civil rights struggle that eventually made possible Obama’s election to the White House.
“If we made as much progress over the next 10 years as we have over the last 50, things would be better,” he said. “And that’s within our grasp.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was