Obama: "African Americans are more fundamentally rooted in the American experience"

Obama did not expand on this, and nor did Anderson Cooper ask a follow up. So did Mr. Obama mean that African Americans are more rooted in American experience than other Americans, or more rooted in American experience than the African experience? Or does it really matter?

Perhaps more importantly, will this become a “gotcha” moment? The quote could imply, at least without proper context, something similar to Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment. It could be the calm before the storm – it hasn’t even been a week since the interview first aired. So far it has been picked up only in the context of a discussion on the African American experience.