During President Obama's visit to a federal prison in Oklahoma this week, he was greeted by Confederate flags. They were the same Confederate flags that South Carolina removed from its Statehouse grounds earlier this month after the racially motivated shooting deaths of nine people at historically black Charleston church in June.
Still, such an occurrence is not new for the president, who was bombarded with racist messages upon joining Twitter in May.
The quest to end racism is, as Obama said on a podcast about race after the June shootings, not as simple as removing racial epithets from our vocabulary, however.
Instead, Obama's most poignant and simple response to the Confederate flags actually came one day before they greeted him in Oklahoma.
At the NAACP Conference on Tuesday, the president said, “If we keep taking steps toward a more perfect union, and close the gaps between who we are and who we want to be, America will move forward.”
Read more commentary from the Washington Post. A transcript of the president's entire speech at the NAACP Conference can be found here.
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