Former President Jimmy Carter argued Thursday that an “innate racism” continues to linger in America in the aftermath of the shooting in Charleston, S.C. and other “black confrontations” over the past year.
Appearing on the “PBS NewsHour” with host Judy Woodruff, Carter, who’s currently out promoting a new book, also told the host that America still has “a long way to go” to sufficiently address racism in America.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Why do you think this country still wrestles so much with race?
JIMMY CARTER: Well, I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief back in the ’60s after we had 100 years of racial discrimination, with separate but equal, when the Supreme Court and Congress agreed to have that, all the churches — and after the [Lyndon] Johnson years of Voting Rights Act and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andy Young and others being successful, I think the United States kind of breathed a sigh of relief and said, well, we’ve resolved the race issue and and there won’t be any more detected, or at least elements of the American society where whites are in the supreme position to the detriment of blacks. And I think the recent high publicity about the police and black confrontations and the tragedy in Charleston have reminded us that we still have a long way to go. There’s still innate racism in our country that still needs to be addressed accurately and I think the Confederate flag has been, for some people, a lingering element of this. Georgia did away with it 14 years ago, and the governor that did it was soundly defeated when he was up for reelection probably because of the flag.