President Obama (AP Photo)

(Politico) – President Barack Obama’s glad he said what he said.

And he believes America proved his point on Monday: Even in the wake of an amateur white supremacist shooting nine African-Americans to death in a historically black church in the hopes of inciting a race war, we still struggle to have a genuine discussion about race in this country.

Aides said that walking into Marc Maron’s garage to tape a podcast on Friday, Obama knew he’d probably get asked about race, and he knew roughly what he wanted to say. When the taping ended, he could guess that most people would focus on the president of the United States, the nation’s black president, using the most racially charged word in the English language.

When the interview went live Monday morning, the news went everywhere: Obama said “nigger.”

The reaction, in Obama’s mind, is a good thing. Like a national experiment in abstract expressionism, the response it’s generated has shown him he was right in the point he was making about what’s wrong with how the country talks about race.

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