Author and activist Cornel West over the weekend praised President Barack Obama for addressing white supremacy, saying it was a "matter of national security." Last week, the president responded to the massacre of nine members of a black church in Charleston at the hands of a white supremacist by telling podcaster Marc Maron that the country had not been "cured" of racism just because people were too polite to use the N-word in public. "Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 or 300 years prior," Obama explained. On Friday, the president delivered a powerful eulogy for slain pastor Clementa Pinckney, noting that the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse grounds had been more than a token of Southern heritage, it had been a symbol of slavery and racial oppression. "What does it mean to keep people afraid and scare and intimidated, to keep black people thinking we are less intelligent, less beautiful?" West pointed out to CNN host Brian Stelter on Sunday.