Everything’s relative when folks start debating what is and isn’t acceptable conduct for the president of the United States: Recall that just a week into President Barack Obama’s tenure, former White House chief of staff Andy Card insisted that Obama lacked proper respect for the position because he sat in the Oval Office without a suit jacket on — an alleged faux pas that was actually far from unprecedented, including by Card’s former boss, George W. Bush.
That’s something to consider when deciding whether you share the concern, raised on the set of “Fox &Friends” on Monday morning, that when Obama used the “n-word” in an interview on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast, the utterance was “beneath the dignity” of the presidency. This president’s detractors tend find a lot of the things he says and does undignified.
For the record, this one wasn’t.
Although Fox’s Steve Doocy forecast that “people will be talking about … whether or not it is beneath the dignity of his office” and Fox’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck wondered aloud if he’d wind up letting the n-word fly “in a State of the Union or more public address,” their worry over White House decorum is almost certainly unwarranted.
And despite Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, telling conservative talker Hugh Hewitt that he didn’t understand the president’s “gratuitous” use of the n-word or Fox contributor Deneen Borelli decrying Obama’s use of “the gutterspeak of rap music,” Obama was, in fact, making a perfectly reasonable point about race relations in America. And unapologetically using the actual word helped him make it.
Here’s what he said:
Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” 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.
Even if you object to his thesis, there’s not much doubt his word choice was non-gratuitously rooted in context. By that measure, any notion that deploying the n-word was beneath the dignity of the presidency is either naïve or a deliberate missing of the point.
In the last two weeks we’ve seen police violently expel black kids from a pool party, Rachel Dolezal’s surreal story and the horrific killing of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a sequence of events that, for better or worse, has once again propelled us into the oft-discussed “national conversation on race” that at various turns Obama has either been accused of over-emphasizing, not having the capacity to conduct or failing to prioritize — and now here he is leading the conversation by making a point that’s essential to moving ahead to next steps in the discussion: that if any useful dialogue about race in America has any chance of taking place, a first step is acknowledging that the n-word isn’t the most important index for determining whether race is implicated.
If Obama’s critics think the real calamity here is his matter-of-fact use of the n-word — and not the fact that in 2015, so many Americans of different backgrounds can’t seem to reach consensus on seemingly basic issues when it comes to race — then they’re actually making Obama’s point for him by focusing on “nigger“ and not the rest of what he had to say.
And if the issue is the appropriateness of Obama’s word choice, then Fox’s Brett Baier got it right when he noted to his colleagues that it’s most likely Obama’s “prerogative,” in year seven of his tenure, to bring the issue up this way, given his “unique perspective” as the nation’s first African-American president.
It’s not like the president secretly hates black people. It’s not as if he let the word go while reading to a kindergarten class. It’s not like it’s the first thing he’s ever said on the topic — he spoke about race in his “A More Perfect Union” address, in his speech this year at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and at any number of points in between. And it’s not like he’s Chet Haze, Tom Hanks’ aspiring-rapper son who recently argued that “White people, like, use that term,” also. Whether you’re an Obama fan or not, he should have at least enough cred to use the n-word when he’s making a point about the n-word.
If he can’t use that word to advance the conversation, who can?
David Swerdlick is an assistant editor for PostEverything.
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