BARACK OBAMA deployed the most explosive of racial epithets yesterday as he urged America to tackle its enduring legacy of racism and slavery after the shooting of nine black churchgoers.
The country’s first African-American president used the “N-word” in an interview to drive home the message that the country is still plagued by racism.
He was speaking hours before South Carolina’s Republican governor appealed to the state legislature to take down the Confederate Civil War flag of the proslavery South from the grounds of the capitol.
Although many whites regard it as an emblem of heritage and pride, the flag is widely viewed by blacks as a symbol of the state’s dark past of slavery and more recently segregation.
Dylann Roof, the accused Charleston church killer, was photographed posing with the flag in pictures accompanying an online “manifesto”.
It has also emerged that the leader of a self-styled “white rights” group that inspired Roof has made campaign donations to several leading Republican politicians, including three 2016 presidential candidates.
Mr Obama made his jarring comments in a podcast with the comedian Marc Maron. “Racism, we are not cured of it,” he said. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n----- 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, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
Mr Obama emphasised that the US had made progress on race relations in recent decades, citing his own experiences as the son of a white American mother and an African father. “I always tell young people, in particular, do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America, unless you’ve lived through being a black man in the 1950s or ’60s or ’70s,” he said.
But he noted that the legacy of slavery and the discriminatory laws of the South continued to cast “a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA”.
The White House stressed that it was not the first time Mr Obama had used the N-word — notably, it appeared in his memoir — but his blunt language reflected a growing openness to discussing race in the later years of his presidency.
In Charleston, public protests since the killings have focused on demands for the removal of the Confederate flag.
Last night, after talks with the state legislature, Nikki Haley, the South Carolina governor announced: “It’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds.”
Ms Haley, who is the daughter of Sikh immigrants, has previously rejected calls to support the flag’s removal but said that recent events “call upon us to look at this in a different way”.
In an online “manifesto”, Roof said he had been inspired by an extremist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a US monitor of hate groups, describes the council as a supremacist organisation virulently opposed to “race mixing”.
The group’s president, Eric Holt, has donated to the presidential campaigns of the Republican senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as well as other leading conservative politicians, according to financial records first reported by The Guardian. When contacted about the donations, Mr Cruz’s team said it would return the funds. Mr Paul’s campaign said it would donate the money to assist Roof’s victims.