President Barack Obama recalled how he had, and hadn't, changed since his early college years in Southern California and the progress of race relations in America, even using the N-word, in a podcast released Monday.
In an interview Friday with comedian Marc Maron for the "WTF With Mark Maron" podcast, Obama described how, as a sophomore in college, he came to terms with his identity. He began attending Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979 before transferring to Columbia University.
"Right around my sophomore year, I started figuring out that a lot of the ideas I had taken on about being a rebel or being a tough guy or being cool were really not me, they were just things that I was trying on because I was insecure or I was a kid," Obama said. "That's an important moment in my life although also a scary one because then you start realizing, 'Well I actually have to figure out what I really do believe and what is important and who am I really?' And a lot of that revolved around issues of race and being able to say that I don't have to be one way to be both an African American but also somebody who affirms the white side of my family."
On the topic of racism, Obama said race relations have improved significantly since the 1950s and 1960s, but racism still has a hold on America. The interview was conducted in the wake of a shooting massacre that left nine black church members dead in South Carolina.
"The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, that casts a long shadow and that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it, racism," Obama said. "We are not cured of it. 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 just overnight completely erase everything that happened two to 300 years prior."
Obama said he never would have guessed he would be in Maron's garage doing an interview as president.
"If I thought to myself, that when I was in college, that I'd be in a garage a couple miles away from where I was living doing an interview as president with a comedian... it's not possible to imagine," he said.
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Obama headed back to Washington from the Coachella Valley Sunday. Obama spent Thursday and early Friday in the Los Angeles area, where he attended two fundraisers before the appearance in Maron's Highland Park garage.
It continues a trend of June visits by the president, who came to the area around Father's Day last year and in 2013.
