Obama used the n-word in a frank podcast interview about race

Barack Obama
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Comedian Marc Maron has interviewed hundreds of celebrities on his WTF podcast, but none higher profile than President Barack Obama. The commander-in-chief stopped by Maron's garage to talk U.S. race relations in an episode released Monday. In the aftermath of last week's deadly shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the president cautioned listeners against believing racism no longer exists:

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say n-gger 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. [WTF with Marc Maron]

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Julie Kliegman

Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.