Obama spikes the proverbial racism football.

Via WaPo:

It didn’t immediately appear to be so, but President Obama just gave one of his most candid interviews on race.

In a 25-minute interview on Black Entertainment Television airing Monday night, Obama offered some basic comments about hearing young activists talk about their personal experiences of “having been stopped for no reason or having generated suspicion because they were in a community where they supposedly didn’t belong.” He said the conversations reminded him of his own experiences as a young man, a theme he has touched on before going back to his race speech in 2008, and he said it was “personal” for him.

But he also had this to say about the kind of cultural and political impact of the Eric Garner video.

“It used to be folks would say, well, maybe blacks are exaggerating, maybe some of these situations aren’t what they describe. But we’ve now seen on television for everybody to see — gives us an opportunity, I think, to finally have the kind of conversation that’s been a long time coming.”