Marc Maron, Obama, and what conservatives don't understand about the N-word

During a wide-ranging interview with Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, President Obama frankly discussed his upbringing, presidential style, America's political institutions, gun control, race, and much more. The media, however, zeroed in on a tiny little snippet of the interview, in which Obama let slip the dreaded N-word.

There was an instant media frenzy to see who could win the traffic sweepstakes (including The Week, to be fair). Many conservatives also exploded in outrage — in a way that, in the days after the Charleston shooting, only further illustrates their continuing weakness on racial issues. Until they can grasp the social and institutional character of racism, they will continue to flail in the debate about race.

Let's print exactly what Obama said:

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The first thing that should be distinguished here is that Obama was not using the word in reference to a person, but was merely mentioning it as an example of overt discrimination. The meaning of the above paragraph would not change in the slightest degree if he had substituted a euphemism.

Furthermore, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out many times, all words without exception exist in context, and black Americans, as the victims of racial slurs, have the right to appropriate those slurs in their own defense.

The screeching reaction from Fox News' Todd Starnes and Deneen Borelli suggests a view of racism that is akin to a magical incantation. If people choose to utter the incorrect syllables, then culture is besmirched and the goals of racism are advanced. This reflects a common conservative view of racism as a sin of individuals, revealed and reinforced by the use of language.

The truth is exactly the opposite: Racial slurs take their power from the underlying reality of institutional white supremacy. A white person using the N-word would carry hardly any weight if there had been no kidnapping or Middle Passage, no centuries of slavery or "whipping machine," no Civil War, no KKK or Red Shirts, no overthrow of Reconstruction, no Jim Crow or white terrorism, no segregation, no redlining or blockbusting, no racist police forces, no mass incarceration.

As Charles Mills emphasizes in his short, brilliant book The Racial Contract, white supremacy is a system that operates without much concern for the attitudes of the individual. It is both rooted in and creates bigoted attitudes among the broad white population, and any single person's beliefs are basically irrelevant.

This means that purging the use of the N-word from all American discourse (aside from being a baldly racist double standard) would not accomplish anything whatsoever towards the cause of racial justice or harmony. Indeed, as Dara Lind points out, the savvier racists had stopped using the N-word by about the 1940s, recognizing it as politically counterproductive and gauche.

That boring, obvious, uncontroversial argument, sharpened slightly by the utterance of a loaded word, is all Obama was saying. In fact, if anything he was far too blithe in his view of racial progress over the past several decades. Just before the remarks that set off so much controversy, he insisted, "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. That is a fact."

It's probably true that people are more tolerant today. But on a whole slew of social indicators, the gap between black and white has not improved in 35 years. Since 1980, the income gap has become worse. The wealth gap is worse. Segregation has increased. Mass incarceration, particularly of young black men, is dramatically worse.

In other words, white supremacy continues to operate on autopilot. Without concerted policy action to tackle it, the disparities of the past will be passed along to the future — through inheritance, the scars of poverty, and unconscious learned bias. Conservatives like Chief Justice John Roberts, who thinks that the way to deal with racism is to abolish affirmative action, are keeping that system going.