During a radio interview Obama was giving in the wake of Dylann Storm Roof's horrific murder of nine black people in Charleston – the South Carolina city where the Confederate flag still flies – Obama informed his host that the United States had not gotten rid of its issues with racism.

"Racism, we are not cured of it," the president said. "And it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public." As an American born to a Kenyan father, Obama might know a thing or two about the racism embedded within America's rotten social infrastructures and what it takes to overcome it. He's allowed to say the "N-word" if he wants to. But not everyone sees it that way.

Fox News guest Deneen Borelli (who is black) described Obama as "rapper-in-chief" and "the first President of rap, of street" after his radio interview. “He has really dragged in the gutter-speak of rap music," she said, as if rap music is the only place the N-word gets said. Racists say it too. American media has previous for desperately connecting racism to rap music.

After a video of Oklahoma students singing racist songs on a bus emerged earlier this year, rapper Waka Flocka Flame cancelled his show at the university. Commentators tried to move the responsibility of singing about hanging black people from a tree from the white perpetrators and onto Flocka Flame. "People are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they’ve been hearing," said host Bill Kristol.

In yesterday's broadcast Borelli went on to say, "I mean, come on, he has lowered the stature of the high office of the President of the United States," as if no president has ever dropped the n-bomb privately before. Fox News host Bill Bremmer (who is white) contributed his opinion on Obama's use of the word. "This is something that we thought was entirely off-limits and now you have the President using it.”

This isn't really about whether or not Bill Bremmer should be allowed to say the N-word, but about the fact that black people are still dying at the hands of white people and many of America's media outlets will try and find any other reason for it, apart from the actual reason which is that centuries' worth of racist attitudes are yet to be weeded out of the most modern in the country in the world. Guess it's easier to say it's rap music.