Unfortunately, we can't. Issues of race continue to plague America. To a large extent, your race still determines where you live, where your kids go to school and the quality of education they receive, and what your job prospects are. Race also plays a large role in how the police and the criminal-justice system treat you. If you are a minority, you are often viewed as a suspect, and you are likely to receive harsher penalties than white Americans if you are convicted of an offense.
Police brutality is a huge problem for black people in the United States.
In February, an Albany, N.Y., jury acquitted four white New York City police officers of all charges in the killing of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant. The plainclothes members of the Street Crimes Unit had fired 41 bullets at the unarmed street vendor as he stood in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment house on Feb. 4, 1999. After the verdict, the jurors, who included four black women, stated that race was not even mentioned during their deliberations. That is like saying that nobody noticed the 5,000-pound elephant in the back seat of the Volkswagen Beetle. On March 16 this year, Patrick Dorismond became the latest tragic addition to a long line of unarmed black New Yorkers to lose their lives at the hands of the police.