Obama on America’s “Fever of Racism”

In a November 2020 interview, National Public Radio host Michel Martin asked Obama to speak about the “fever of racism” that allegedly plagued the United States. “That fever, as you said, that’s been a defining feature of a lot of our life,” Obama replied, adding that many American racists had resented his presidency simply because he was the first black man to hold that office:

“I think that what did happen during my presidency was yes, a backlash among some people who felt that somehow, I symbolized the possibility that they or their group were losing status not because of anything I did, but just by virtue of the fact that I didn’t look like all the other presidents previously…. It would surprise me if you didn’t have a big cross-section of the country that was still carrying around a bunch of baggage and still a little disturbed by the advances that African Americans had made. It would surprise me if changing demographics and the growing Latino population didn’t scare a certain segment of this population, just because I know enough about American history to know that that’s always been a fault line in American history.”

In the same interview, Obama lauded the nationwide protests and riots sparked by the May 25, 2020 incident in which George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, had died shortly after a physical encounter with a white police officer in Minneapolis. Lamenting America’s intransigent “systemic injustices” in “inequities,” Obama said: “I think what happened this summer with George Floyd was so important, where you saw at least some shift in the general population in recognizing that there’s real racial bias in how our criminal laws are applied and how policing operates in this country.”