CNN’s Candy Crowley interviews President Barack Obama |
CNN’s Candy Crowley interviews President Barack Obama
Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-12-21
For his last interview of the year, President Obama sat down, exclusively, with CNN’s Candy Crowley to discuss North Korea’s cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, normalizing relations with Cuba, Russia, Iran, race relations in America and Guantanamo Bay.
The interview aired Sunday, December 21st, on CNN at 09:00 and 12:00 EST
Text highlights and a transcript of the discussion are below…
…CROWLEY: …And I thought, you know, do you think that you look at race matters somewhat differently because, yes, you’re the first African-American president, but your mother was white.
OBAMA: Right.
CROWLEY: You were raised by your mother and your white grandparents.
OBAMA: Yes.
CROWLEY: Does that give you a different perspective, do you think?
OBAMA: I think it probably does. I – you know, I wrote a whole book about this. And, uh, there’s no doubt that, you know, I move back and forth between the racial divides, not just black-white, but Asian and Latino and, you know, I’ve got a lot of cultural influences.
I – I think what it does do for me is to recognize that most Americans have good intentions. I said a little bit about this in the press conference earlier today.
I assume the best rather than the worst in others. But it also makes me mindful of the fact that there’s misunderstanding, there’s mistrust and there are biases both overt and sometimes hidden that operate in ways that disadvantage minority communities.
And that’s a carryover. There’s a long legacy in this country that has gotten enormously better, but is still there. And when you look at what’s happened in law enforcement across the country over the last several years, um, that’s not news to African-Americans. What’s different is simply that some of it’s now videotaped and people see it.
And the question then becomes, you know, what practical steps can we take to solve this problem?
And I believe that the overwhelming majority of white Americans, as well as African-Americans, want to see this problem solved.
So I have confidence that by surfacing these issues, we’re going to be able to make progress on them…
Read the entire interview transcript here.
Tags: Cable News Network, Candy Crowley, CNN