President Obama explained Friday why he used the occasion of the Charleston AME church massacre to talk about job discrimination.
In an excerpt from his interview on NBC Friday, Lester Holt asked Obama, “After the Charleston massacre, you delivered the eulogy. And then you went farther than talking about it. I’m going to read the quote.”
“‘Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us, even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racist slurs but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal,'” he quoted Obama as saying.
Holt then subtly pushed Obama on why he chose to inject the issue of employment discrimination into a funeral of innocent black Christians who had been murdered by a young man looking to start an actual race war.
“Jamal wasn’t getting called back for that interview five years earlier. Why did you not talk about things in that explicit way before?” Holt asked Obama.
“There are going to be times when people will listen and times where they won’t. This was a moment when I think the entire country recognized not just the evil that had been perpetrated but also this amazing response on the part of these people in this church. There were open hearts at that moment,” the president explained.
NBC then cut to Obama singing “Amazing Grace.”
