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A black man governed the White House a little more than half a century later, inhabiting the Oval Office, sitting at the head of the Situation Room conference table, and lounging in the Executive Mansion with his lovely young family - a family that has given such elegance and beauty to America's sleepy capital that it is possible to speak of a Black Camelot.

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Brookings - Quality. Independence. Impact.

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The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.

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When E Frederic Morrow, a former TV executive, became the first black White House staffer without a job description that included turning down beds, polishing shoes, or bringing beverages with a polite bow in the 1950s, he was forbidden from ever being alone in the same room with a white lady.

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Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement.

In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

Whites-only water fountains. Whites-only schools. Whites-only graveyards.

In some states, his very conception - involving an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - would have been a criminal offence.

Washington, too, remained a largely segregated city.

When in the 1950s, a former TV executive by the name of E Frederic Morrow became the first black White House aide not to have a job description that included turning down beds, polishing shoes or serving drinks with a deferential bow, he was prohibited from ever being alone in the same room as a white woman.

Back then, as Morrow recounted in his memoir, Black Man in the White House, African-Americans were routinely stereotyped as sexual predators incapable of controlling their desires.

Little more than half a century later, a black man ran the White House - occupying the Oval Office, sitting at the head of the conference table in the Situation Room, relaxing with his beautiful young family in the Executive Mansion - a family that has brought such grace and glamour to America's sleepy capital that it is possible to speak of a Black Camelot.

When Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived in the White House, that would have been unthinkable, even though the civil rights movement was starting to hammer more insistently at the walls of prejudice, and seeking legal and legislative redress for a malignant national condition described as the "American dilemma".

When demonstrators assembled in August 1963 to hear Martin Luther King deliver his I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, few would have thought that a black man would one day take the oath of office at the other end of the National Mall.

Likewise, how many of the protesters bludgeoned by white policemen on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 would have dared to imagine that, 50 years later, they would cross that same bridge hand in hand with the country's first black president?

For veterans of the black struggle, those remarkable images of Obama marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protest became instantly iconographic, a truly golden jubilee.

In legacy terms, his very presence in the White House is one of the great intangibles of his presidency. Just how many black Americans have been encouraged to surmount colour bars of their own? Just how many young African-Americans have altered the trajectory of their lives because of the example set by Obama?

And behaviourally, what an example it has been. Because of the lingering racism in American society, the Obamas doubtless knew they would have to reach a higher standard, and they have done so, seemingly, without breaking a sweat. In deportment and personal conduct, it is hard to recall a more impressive or well-rounded First Family.

The "when they go low, we go high" approach to racists who questioned his citizenship has made the Obamas look even more classy.

His family's dignity in the face of such ugliness recalls the poise of black sit-in protesters in the early 60s, who refused to relinquish their seats at segregated restaurants and lunch counters even as white thugs poured sugar and ketchup over their heads, and punched, kicked and spat at them.

Yet racial firsts, of the kind achieved by Barack Hussein Obama, can present a distorted view of history and convey a misleading sense of progress. They are, by their very nature, a singular achievement, a milestone indicative of black advance rather than a destination point.

Hollywood did not become colourblind the moment in 1964 that Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win best actor at the Academy Awards any more than discrimination ended in the justice system when Thurgood Marshall first donned the billowing robes of a Supreme Court jurist.

America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it.

Indeed, the insurmountable problem for Obama was that he reached the mountaintop on day one of his presidency.

Achieving anything on the racial front that surpassed becoming the country's first black president was always going to be daunting. Compounding that problem were the unrealistically high expectations surrounding his presidency.

His election triumph is 2008 was also misinterpreted as an act of national atonement for the original sin of slavery and the stain of segregation.

Yet Obama did not win the election because he was a black man. It was primarily because a country facing an economic crisis and embroiled in two unpopular wars was crying out for change.

Doubtless there have been substantive reforms. His two black attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have revitalised the work of the justice department's civil rights division, which was dormant during the Bush years.

The Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, as it was inevitably dubbed, cut the black uninsured rate by a third.

Partly in a bid to reverse the rate of black incarceration, he has commuted the sentences of hundreds of prisoners - 10 times the number of his five predecessors added together.

As well as calling for the closure of private prisons, he became the first president to visit a federal penitentiary. "There but for the grace of God," said a man who had smoked pot and dabbled with cocaine in his youth.

Early on, he used the bully pulpit of the presidency to assail black absentee fathers, and, more latterly, spoke out against police brutality. But that record of accomplishment looks rather meagre when compared to the drama of hearing "Hail to the Chief" accompany the arrival of a black man on the presidential stage.

Race relations have arguably become more polarised and tenser since 20 January 2009. Though smaller in scale and scope, the demonstrations sparked by police shootings of unarmed black men were reminiscent of the turbulence of the 1960s.

The toxic cloud from the tear gas unleashed in Ferguson and elsewhere cast a long and sometimes overwhelming shadow. Not since the LA riots in 1992 - the violent response to the beating of Rodney King and the later acquittal of the police officers filmed assaulting him - has the sense of black grievance and outrage been so raw.

Historians will surely be struck by what looks like an anomaly, that the Obama years gave rise to a movement called Black Lives Matter.

Public opinion surveys highlight this racial restlessness. Not long after he took office in 2009, a New York Times/CBS News poll suggested two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. In the midst of last summer's racial turbulence, that poll found there had been a complete reversal. Now 69% of Americans assessed race relations to be mostly bad.

An oft-heard criticism of Obama is that he has failed to bring his great rhetorical skills to bear on the American dilemma, and prioritised the LGBT community's campaign for equality at the expense of the ongoing black struggle.

But while he was happy to cloak himself in the mantle of America's first black president, he did not set out to pursue a black presidency. He did not want his years in office to be defined by his skin colour.

As a candidate, he often left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, rather than doing so himself.

His famed race speech in the 2008 primary campaign, when his friendship with a fiery black preacher threatened to derail his candidacy, was as much about his white heritage as his black.

This remained true when he won election. Besides, there were pressing problems to deal with, not least rescuing the American economy in the midst of the Great Recession and extricating US forces from two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Early on in his presidency, his efforts at racial mediation also seemed ham-fisted. The "beer summit" at the White House, when he brought together the black Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates and the white police officer who had arrested him on the porch of his own home in an affluent suburb of Boston, all seemed rather facile.

A clumsy photo-opportunity rather than a teachable moment. Obama, one sensed, wanted to speak out more forcefully - initially he said the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" - but his political cautiousness reined him in.

Seemingly, he did not want to come across to the public as a black man in the White House.

Rather in those early years, it was as if he was trying to position himself as a neutral arbiter in racial matters, though one sensed his preference was for not intervening at all.

As his presidency went on, however, it became more emphatically black. He spoke out more passionately and more intimately.

Telling reporters that his son would have looked like Trayvon Martin, the unarmed high school student shot dead in Florida by a neighbourhood watch coordinator, was a departure.

This new, more candid approach culminated in Charleston, South Carolina, when Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the black preacher slain, along with eight other worshippers, by a white supremacist at a bible study class at the Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal church.

That afternoon he spoke, as he often does in front of mainly black audiences, with a cadence that almost ventriloquised the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and ended, electrifyingly, by singing Amazing Grace.

That month he seemed to be at the height of his powers.

The Confederate flag, a symbol for many of black subordination, was about to brought down in the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol because the Charleston gunman Dylann Roof had brandished it so provocatively.

Obamacare had withstood a Supreme Court challenge. On the morning that he flew to Charleston, the Supreme Court decreed same-sex marriage would be legal in every state. Progressivism seemed to have triumphed. Obama seemed to have vanquished many of his foes.

But that month Donald Trump had also announced his improbable bid for the White House, and the forces of conservatism were starting to rally behind an outspoken new figurehead, who sensed that nativism, xenophobia and fear of the other would be central to his electoral appeal.

That America's first black president will be followed by the untitled leader of the Birther movement, a candidate slow to disavow support from the Ku Klux Klan and happy to receive the backing of white nationalists, Donald Trump can easily be portrayed as a personal repudiation and also proof of racial regression.

The truth, though, is more complicated.

Obama is ending his presidency with some of his highest personal approval ratings, and clearly believes he would have beaten Trump in a head-to-head contest. Moreover, although Trump won decisively in the electoral college, almost three million people more voted for Hillary Clinton nationwide.

In judging the mood of the country, the 2016 election hardly produced a clear-cut result that lends itself to neat analysis.

What Trump's election does look to have done, however, is end Obama's hopes of being a transformative president, not least because of the proposed rollback of his signature healthcare reform.

Truly transformative presidents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enact reforms, like social security, that become part of the nation's fabric rather than being ripped apart. If Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress get their way, Obamacare will be shredded.

Nor has he been transformative in the attitudinal sense. Indeed, Trump's victory, messy though it was, can easily be viewed partly as a "whitelash".

Much of his earliest and strongest support came from so-called white nationalists, who saw in his candidacy the chance to reassert white cultural and racial dominance. Some of the loudest cheers at his rallies came in response his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim invectives.

Trump's message, from the moment he announced his candidacy to the final tweets of his insurgent campaign, was aimed primarily at white America.

The billionaire's victory also makes it harder to view Obama as a transitional president. Eight years ago, it was tempting to cast the country's first black president as the leader who would oversee a peaceable demographic shift from a still strongly Caucasian America - the last census showed that 62.6% of US citizens are white - to a more ethnically diffuse nation.

But the talk now is of walls, not human bridges.

Of course, the notion that Obama would usher in a post-racial America was always fanciful, and a claim wisely he steered clear of himself. For all his cries of "Yes we can," he was never that naïve.

But the black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a persuasive case that Obama has always been overly optimistic on race, in large part because he did not have a conventional black upbringing.

His formative years were spent in Hawaii, America's most racially integrated state, and the whites he encountered, namely his mother and grandparents, were doting and loving.

Obama was not the victim of discrimination in the same way as a black kid growing up in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or even New York or Illinois. As a result, he may have underestimated the forces that would seek to paralyse his presidency and to impede racial advance more broadly.

The president has said repeatedly since election night that the result proves that history is not linear but rather takes a zig-zagging course.

He is also fond of paraphrasing Martin Luther King's famed line that the arc of history bends towards justice. However, that curvature has veered off in a wholly unexpected direction.

Besides, even to talk of arcs of history at this moment of such national uncertainty seems inapt.

For as we enter the final days of the Obama presidency, the more accurate descriptor of race relations is a fault-line - the most angry fault-line in US politics and American life, and one that continues to rumble away, threatening small explosions at any time.

From Obama we expected seismic change of a more positive kind.

And although it was a presidency that began atop a mountain, it ended in something of a valley.

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Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement. In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

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We have a real chance to eradicate America's structural racism. Biden, on the other hand, appeared to backtrack on his words on The Today Show, aligning himself more with Harris and Scott by pointing out that slavery and Jim Crow laws had a cost.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement.

In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

Whites-only water fountains. Whites-only schools. Whites-only graveyards.

In some states, his very conception - involving an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - would have been a criminal offence.

Washington, too, remained a largely segregated city.

When in the 1950s, a former TV executive by the name of E Frederic Morrow became the first black White House aide not to have a job description that included turning down beds, polishing shoes or serving drinks with a deferential bow, he was prohibited from ever being alone in the same room as a white woman.

Back then, as Morrow recounted in his memoir, Black Man in the White House, African-Americans were routinely stereotyped as sexual predators incapable of controlling their desires.

Little more than half a century later, a black man ran the White House - occupying the Oval Office, sitting at the head of the conference table in the Situation Room, relaxing with his beautiful young family in the Executive Mansion - a family that has brought such grace and glamour to America's sleepy capital that it is possible to speak of a Black Camelot.

When Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived in the White House, that would have been unthinkable, even though the civil rights movement was starting to hammer more insistently at the walls of prejudice, and seeking legal and legislative redress for a malignant national condition described as the "American dilemma".

When demonstrators assembled in August 1963 to hear Martin Luther King deliver his I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, few would have thought that a black man would one day take the oath of office at the other end of the National Mall.

Likewise, how many of the protesters bludgeoned by white policemen on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 would have dared to imagine that, 50 years later, they would cross that same bridge hand in hand with the country's first black president?

For veterans of the black struggle, those remarkable images of Obama marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protest became instantly iconographic, a truly golden jubilee.

In legacy terms, his very presence in the White House is one of the great intangibles of his presidency. Just how many black Americans have been encouraged to surmount colour bars of their own? Just how many young African-Americans have altered the trajectory of their lives because of the example set by Obama?

And behaviourally, what an example it has been. Because of the lingering racism in American society, the Obamas doubtless knew they would have to reach a higher standard, and they have done so, seemingly, without breaking a sweat. In deportment and personal conduct, it is hard to recall a more impressive or well-rounded First Family.

The "when they go low, we go high" approach to racists who questioned his citizenship has made the Obamas look even more classy.

His family's dignity in the face of such ugliness recalls the poise of black sit-in protesters in the early 60s, who refused to relinquish their seats at segregated restaurants and lunch counters even as white thugs poured sugar and ketchup over their heads, and punched, kicked and spat at them.

Yet racial firsts, of the kind achieved by Barack Hussein Obama, can present a distorted view of history and convey a misleading sense of progress. They are, by their very nature, a singular achievement, a milestone indicative of black advance rather than a destination point.

Hollywood did not become colourblind the moment in 1964 that Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win best actor at the Academy Awards any more than discrimination ended in the justice system when Thurgood Marshall first donned the billowing robes of a Supreme Court jurist.

America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it.

Indeed, the insurmountable problem for Obama was that he reached the mountaintop on day one of his presidency.

Achieving anything on the racial front that surpassed becoming the country's first black president was always going to be daunting. Compounding that problem were the unrealistically high expectations surrounding his presidency.

His election triumph is 2008 was also misinterpreted as an act of national atonement for the original sin of slavery and the stain of segregation.

Yet Obama did not win the election because he was a black man. It was primarily because a country facing an economic crisis and embroiled in two unpopular wars was crying out for change.

Doubtless there have been substantive reforms. His two black attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have revitalised the work of the justice department's civil rights division, which was dormant during the Bush years.

The Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, as it was inevitably dubbed, cut the black uninsured rate by a third.

Partly in a bid to reverse the rate of black incarceration, he has commuted the sentences of hundreds of prisoners - 10 times the number of his five predecessors added together.

As well as calling for the closure of private prisons, he became the first president to visit a federal penitentiary. "There but for the grace of God," said a man who had smoked pot and dabbled with cocaine in his youth.

Early on, he used the bully pulpit of the presidency to assail black absentee fathers, and, more latterly, spoke out against police brutality. But that record of accomplishment looks rather meagre when compared to the drama of hearing "Hail to the Chief" accompany the arrival of a black man on the presidential stage.

Race relations have arguably become more polarised and tenser since 20 January 2009. Though smaller in scale and scope, the demonstrations sparked by police shootings of unarmed black men were reminiscent of the turbulence of the 1960s.

The toxic cloud from the tear gas unleashed in Ferguson and elsewhere cast a long and sometimes overwhelming shadow. Not since the LA riots in 1992 - the violent response to the beating of Rodney King and the later acquittal of the police officers filmed assaulting him - has the sense of black grievance and outrage been so raw.

Historians will surely be struck by what looks like an anomaly, that the Obama years gave rise to a movement called Black Lives Matter.

Public opinion surveys highlight this racial restlessness. Not long after he took office in 2009, a New York Times/CBS News poll suggested two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. In the midst of last summer's racial turbulence, that poll found there had been a complete reversal. Now 69% of Americans assessed race relations to be mostly bad.

An oft-heard criticism of Obama is that he has failed to bring his great rhetorical skills to bear on the American dilemma, and prioritised the LGBT community's campaign for equality at the expense of the ongoing black struggle.

But while he was happy to cloak himself in the mantle of America's first black president, he did not set out to pursue a black presidency. He did not want his years in office to be defined by his skin colour.

As a candidate, he often left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, rather than doing so himself.

His famed race speech in the 2008 primary campaign, when his friendship with a fiery black preacher threatened to derail his candidacy, was as much about his white heritage as his black.

This remained true when he won election. Besides, there were pressing problems to deal with, not least rescuing the American economy in the midst of the Great Recession and extricating US forces from two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Early on in his presidency, his efforts at racial mediation also seemed ham-fisted. The "beer summit" at the White House, when he brought together the black Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates and the white police officer who had arrested him on the porch of his own home in an affluent suburb of Boston, all seemed rather facile.

A clumsy photo-opportunity rather than a teachable moment. Obama, one sensed, wanted to speak out more forcefully - initially he said the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" - but his political cautiousness reined him in.

Seemingly, he did not want to come across to the public as a black man in the White House.

Rather in those early years, it was as if he was trying to position himself as a neutral arbiter in racial matters, though one sensed his preference was for not intervening at all.

As his presidency went on, however, it became more emphatically black. He spoke out more passionately and more intimately.

Telling reporters that his son would have looked like Trayvon Martin, the unarmed high school student shot dead in Florida by a neighbourhood watch coordinator, was a departure.

This new, more candid approach culminated in Charleston, South Carolina, when Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the black preacher slain, along with eight other worshippers, by a white supremacist at a bible study class at the Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal church.

That afternoon he spoke, as he often does in front of mainly black audiences, with a cadence that almost ventriloquised the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and ended, electrifyingly, by singing Amazing Grace.

That month he seemed to be at the height of his powers.

The Confederate flag, a symbol for many of black subordination, was about to brought down in the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol because the Charleston gunman Dylann Roof had brandished it so provocatively.

Obamacare had withstood a Supreme Court challenge. On the morning that he flew to Charleston, the Supreme Court decreed same-sex marriage would be legal in every state. Progressivism seemed to have triumphed. Obama seemed to have vanquished many of his foes.

But that month Donald Trump had also announced his improbable bid for the White House, and the forces of conservatism were starting to rally behind an outspoken new figurehead, who sensed that nativism, xenophobia and fear of the other would be central to his electoral appeal.

That America's first black president will be followed by the untitled leader of the Birther movement, a candidate slow to disavow support from the Ku Klux Klan and happy to receive the backing of white nationalists, Donald Trump can easily be portrayed as a personal repudiation and also proof of racial regression.

The truth, though, is more complicated.

Obama is ending his presidency with some of his highest personal approval ratings, and clearly believes he would have beaten Trump in a head-to-head contest. Moreover, although Trump won decisively in the electoral college, almost three million people more voted for Hillary Clinton nationwide.

In judging the mood of the country, the 2016 election hardly produced a clear-cut result that lends itself to neat analysis.

What Trump's election does look to have done, however, is end Obama's hopes of being a transformative president, not least because of the proposed rollback of his signature healthcare reform.

Truly transformative presidents, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enact reforms, like social security, that become part of the nation's fabric rather than being ripped apart. If Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress get their way, Obamacare will be shredded.

Nor has he been transformative in the attitudinal sense. Indeed, Trump's victory, messy though it was, can easily be viewed partly as a "whitelash".

Much of his earliest and strongest support came from so-called white nationalists, who saw in his candidacy the chance to reassert white cultural and racial dominance. Some of the loudest cheers at his rallies came in response his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim invectives.

Trump's message, from the moment he announced his candidacy to the final tweets of his insurgent campaign, was aimed primarily at white America.

The billionaire's victory also makes it harder to view Obama as a transitional president. Eight years ago, it was tempting to cast the country's first black president as the leader who would oversee a peaceable demographic shift from a still strongly Caucasian America - the last census showed that 62.6% of US citizens are white - to a more ethnically diffuse nation.

But the talk now is of walls, not human bridges.

Of course, the notion that Obama would usher in a post-racial America was always fanciful, and a claim wisely he steered clear of himself. For all his cries of "Yes we can," he was never that naïve.

But the black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a persuasive case that Obama has always been overly optimistic on race, in large part because he did not have a conventional black upbringing.

His formative years were spent in Hawaii, America's most racially integrated state, and the whites he encountered, namely his mother and grandparents, were doting and loving.

Obama was not the victim of discrimination in the same way as a black kid growing up in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or even New York or Illinois. As a result, he may have underestimated the forces that would seek to paralyse his presidency and to impede racial advance more broadly.

The president has said repeatedly since election night that the result proves that history is not linear but rather takes a zig-zagging course.

He is also fond of paraphrasing Martin Luther King's famed line that the arc of history bends towards justice. However, that curvature has veered off in a wholly unexpected direction.

Besides, even to talk of arcs of history at this moment of such national uncertainty seems inapt.

For as we enter the final days of the Obama presidency, the more accurate descriptor of race relations is a fault-line - the most angry fault-line in US politics and American life, and one that continues to rumble away, threatening small explosions at any time.

From Obama we expected seismic change of a more positive kind.

And although it was a presidency that began atop a mountain, it ended in something of a valley.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by slaves, a history-defying as well as history-making achievement. In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave.

# data[].attributes.body
America is not a racist country, President Joe Biden said in response to a congressional address. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping,” he acknowledged, adding, I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping.

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping. " When asked o n ABC's Good Morning America the following day , Vice President Kamala Harris s eemed to agree with Scott when she s aid , "I don't think America is a racist country." Yet immediately following this sentence she quickly pointed out , "But we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today."

As Soledad O'Brien said, "It sounds like a racist country to me," in to Scott-but it seemingly applies to comments by Harris as well. President Biden, who seemed to not pull any punches during his speech, stated, "W e have a real chance to root out systemic racism that America ." However, Biden appeared to his remarks on The Today Show to align more with Harris and Scott (to a certain degree) by noting that slavery and Jim Crow laws had a cost.

It is almost as if simply saying America is not racist, but then turning the other cheek and saying it is racist in subtler terms and that racist things have been done to you makes it ok. It is confusing to Americans and the international community. To supporters, these comments are disappointing . To others, they were shocking. For me , the cognitive dissonance of some of our elected leaders is real and explainable . The re is an oversimplification of racism in America, because as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, there can be systemic racism without racists.

W hen a person critique s America for the racism that i s deeply embedded in our social institutions, some feel they are being personally attacked. This is because deep down they realize that they benefit from unearned assets associated with whiteness. Scott, Harris, and Biden recognize this and try to balance these varying perspectives as they worry about voters nationally and in a state like South Carolina.

Recently, a at a city council meeting had a meltdown when trying to explain why she does not want critical race theory taught in her children's school. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that s ystemic racism as a concept is " a bunch of horse manure ." So, not only has Florida made it legal to harm people protesting, but he banned teaching critical race theory in schools. For a deeper dive on critical race theory , people should read the work of sociologists Victor and Ted , who lay out why DeSantis' perspective is problematic .

I conducted with Matt Hunt on what predicts who believes they are middle class. For education, income, and occupational prestige, Black people are less likely to identify as middle class compared to whites with comparable levels of these socioeconomic outcomes. Why? It is because social class is not just about what a person looks like on paper , but how people experience social class in everyday life and t he deference that one receives for their socioeconomic status. Black people are less likely to get that deference, while white people are often afforded more. It is so commonplace for white people that some cannot fathom living without it. This is because many white people, particularly white people with lower levels of education and income, realize that comes with a premium that extends beyond economics to include cultural and social capital. As Pr esident Lyndon Johnson said, " If you can the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and h e'll empty his pockets for you."

Harris and Scotts' comments are puzzling at a broader level as well considering how much of a collective memory their experiences with racism are- Harris reliving her systemic experiences with bussing and Scott recounting the nearly 20 times he has been pulled over by police, where being an elected official potentially made the interaction worse.

These stories acknowledge that life is different if you are Black, and unfortunately systemic racism seems to ripple through our social institutions and into our daily social interactions, whether in Congress or at a coffee shop down the street from the Capitol. These type s of experiences-racialized cuts and hurdles- have a cumulative effect on . Sociologist s Pam Jackson and Jason Cummings' research documents that middle-class Blacks have worse health profiles than working-class whites. They attribute this difference to the daily racialized trauma experienced in predominately white environments like work and neighborhood settings.

Systemically, we know that Black people compared to whites are more likely to attend schools with less funding per student, less likely to obtain a job because of our "Black-sounding" name or even when attending an Ivy League university , less likely to obtain a (even when having the same credit score ), have their homes appraised for equitable value, more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal mortality , and more likely to have contact with police and the criminal justice system .

Systemic racism inhibits (rather than prohibits like in the past) people's ability to actualize all aspects of the American Dream. This occurs  even for highly-educated Black people with high incomes and no criminal record. In fact, research documents that white people with a criminal record are more likely to get called back for a job than Black people without one.

Research documents that hard work (or lack thereof ), intellect, or criminality do not explain these outcomes. Instead, it is the embedded deeply within our social institutions' , rules, regulations, and laws that segment people's experiences along racial lines. It is the same for gender. Women can achieve but have a much harder time doing so. If not, America would have had a woman vice president and speaker of the House sitting behind the p resident long before 2021.

What people do not seem to realize is that being upwardly mobile does not negate encountering racist hurdles on the pathway to success. Our current system is set up for some people to have to jump over hurdles to succeed, while others get to simply run to the finish line without those sa me racial hurdles. Rather , it is about whether the pathways to success are equitable . This is what America says it is: an equitable democracy. People are pushing for America to reach its true ideal s and the only way this can properly occur is acknowledging the systemic barriers that prevent us from getting there. Moreover, it is not that racial progress has not been made. It is that the United States has yet to make enough progress. In this regard, comment s of our top elected officials are disappointing, yet predictable.

Black people who succeed often walk on pins and needles because they realize that their success, and more so maintaining it, is precarious.   As a result, some Black people aim to make white pe ople feel comfortable. Many of us are mostly socialized to do so. I t is often a survival strategy for our lives during police encounters or economic survival in boardrooms. Some of us who succeed may experience "survivor's remorse" because we are some of the few to "make it." We actually embody the American Dream and become the in-person example to people who do not want to admit that systemic racism exists. We may even convince ourselves that racism is more prominent on the individual level than the institutional level. We simultaneously represent racial progress but are also most likely to be subjugated to racial discrimination because of the predominately white spaces we are embedded within. We experience a chronic form of double-consciousness   and admitting as such can often lead us to being conscious of the slow death we often experience through the cumulative racist cuts and hurdles we encounter.   The American Dream being achievable for a few does not absolve the system and an imperfect union, even when some of those successful people try to rationalize systemic racism away.

In most instances: When Black parents worry about their straight-A student's traffic encounters with the police more than they do a potential accident, this is because of experiences with racism. When a Black couple is about to have a baby and has to think consciously about what hospital to deliver in so they can obtain equitable care, this is racism. When a Black parent worries about their child attending a prestigious university outside of an urban area, this is often because of the racism they worry about them encountering driving to the school and even once physically on the campus of the school. And even more urban universities are not absolved from .

Systemic racism is not simply a thing of the past. It is up close and personal in the present.

R acism may be no more transparent in an institution with the least representative racial progress like the Senate. There have only been 11 Black senators in roughly 232 years. Clearly, the Senate is the exact space we need people with the courage to say the blunt, honest truth about our nation's past and present. Only then can we actualize a future where systemic racism does not exist. It is imperative for a , reconciliation, and reparative process to commence. This starts with atoning for the enslavement of of Africans whose descendants contin uously fall systemically behind , whether they end up being the lone Black Republican senator or a Black police officer who might have the power to pull him over.   We must have the courage to speak truth to power and one of the places it starts is in Congress.   "If not now, then when?"

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South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott shocked many people when, in response to President Joe Biden's congressional address, he stated that " America is not a racist country ." He admitted that he himself had experienced " the pain of discrimination, " and noted, " I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I'm shopping.