Obama Reverses Course On Reparations In Candid Podcast

The former President brought up how reparations seem necessary to level the playing field for African-Americans but that he sees why Whites wouldn’t be on board.

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

Former President Obama spoke about race relations in America with Bruce Springsteen in their new Spotify-exclusive podcast Renegades: Born in the USA. At one point, the pair touched on reparations, where Obama justified the need for them now. He said, “the wealth of this country, the power of this country … not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it … but a large portion of it, was built on the backs of slaves.” This is a huge departure from where Obama stood while President.

Back in 2016, in an Atlantic interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Obama explained that it was hard from a practical sense to right the wrongs made to Blacks over centuries. At the time he said,

Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s…