Larry Wilmore: Obama's Hardly the First President to Say "Nigger"
President Obama talked for an hour on the latest episode of comedian Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, released Monday, but the only word anybody heard was “nigger.” After Fox News and crazy ol’ Don Lemon had their chance to get worked up over Obama’s pointed use of the word, Larry Wilmore used his Nightly Show monologue Monday night to inject some common sense into the conversation.
Here’s Wilmore with a reminder that, contrary to what Fox implies, Obama’s not the first president to “drag in the gutter-speak of rap” by saying “nigger.” He’s not even the first president to say it on tape—cue clips of Richard Nixon telling Donald Rumsfeld, “Our niggers are better than their niggers” and LBJ observing “there’s more niggers voting there than white folks.”
But when the first black president says it to illustrate the point that American racism hasn’t suddenly disappeared just because it’s become less explicit, that’s somehow more offensive? Please.
