[caption id=”attachment_137447″ align=”aligncenter” width=”853″] President Barack Obama pauses while speaking in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, June 18, 2015, on the church shooting in Charleston, S.C., prior to his departure to Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
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During an appearance on an episode of the WTF podcast with comedian Marc Maron that dropped Monday, President Obama acknowledged the progress that the U.S. has made in terms of fighting racism but said that the country nevertheless has not been “cured” of prejudice.
Reflecting on the tragic, race-motivated shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, that occurred late Wednesday, Obama commented more broadly on recent evidence — the unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson — of the fact that race relations in America remain imperfect.
“I always tell young people in particular, do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s or 60s or 70s,” Obama explained. “It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime.”
Nevertheless, the president affirmed that the country cannot simply purge its history of racism.
“The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — that casts a long shadow,” he said. “That’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it. Racism we are not cured of.”
“It’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘n—-r’ in public,” Obama continued. “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 completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
According to Obama, our job as a nation is now to “try in very concrete ways to figure out what more can we do” when it comes to ridding society of prejudice, whether that be finding ways to better police-community relations or something entirely different.
On the topic of the Charleston tragedy in particular, Obama emphasized the need to enhance “basic, common sense gun safety laws” so that the U.S. can sidestep the mass shootings that have time and again lead to “devastating losses.”
“I’ve done this way too often. During the course of my presidency, it feels as if a couple of times a year, I end up having to speak to the country and to speak to a particular community about a devastating loss,” explained Obama, later adding, “This is unique to our country. There is no other advanced nation on earth that tolerates multiple shootings on a regular basis and considers it normal.”
The president urged Americans to engage in “public and voter pressure” in order to push the country’s lawmakers to prioritize gun control.
“I don’t foresee any real action being taken 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,” Obama surmised.
