It happened decades ago, but former President Barack Obama still clearly remembers the day someone he thought had his back called him a racial epithet.
“Listen, when I was in school, I had a friend. We played basketball together,” Obama told Bruce Springsteen on their new Spotify podcast, Renegades: Born in the USA. “And one time we got into a fight and he called me a c***. And I remember I popped him in the face and broke his nose.”
The move was an instant reaction.
“And he said, ‘Why’d you do that?” Obama recalled. “And I explained to him — I said, ‘Don’t you ever call me something like that.'”
Springsteen, a friend of Obama’s, told him about witnessing something similar that happened to Clarence Clemons, his late saxophonist and close friend, who was also a Black man. They had gone to a club when someone called Clemons the n-word. Springsteen saw how upset Clemons was…
— to sports.yahoo.com
