article_snippet: People do need to talk about race.
article_snippet: At Stony Brook University, one of our tour stops, a young white male student asked our panel if effecting change in racial discrimination today was even harder to achieve than it was during the Civil Rights era when racism was more overt.  
article_snippet: In this country we sometimes pretend we are so far past the ugly days of Jim Crow and middle-of-the-night cross burnings as to have no racial issues to discuss.
article_snippet: our did, after all, elect a black president who, like me, has both a black and a white parent and descends from immigrants.
article_snippet: But blacks and whites don't see things the same, and that is a big problem we need to discuss.
article_snippet: Pew Research Center asked people of both races this year how much more needs to be done to achieve racial equality.
article_snippet: Seventy-nine percent of blacks said "a lot" more work needs to be done.
article_snippet: Just 44% of whites thought the same.
article_snippet: this country is more diverse than ever -- 13% African-American and 17% Latino, according to the U.S. Census -- but we still live in different worlds.  
article_snippet: Blacks have more debt, higher unemployment, less financial security, are less likely to be married or own homes, and are less likely to be represented in corporate boardrooms, the tech industry or even Congress.
article_snippet: Perhaps more alarmingly, 75% of black students are going to schools where the majority of the students look just like 75% of black students.
article_snippet: It has been 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to bring our schoolchildren together on an equal playing field.
article_snippet: Recently, Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, examined the details behind 3,959 lynchings in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.
article_snippet: The percentage of whites who agree with that perception hovers in the mid-30s.
article_snippet: Black people talk about race all the time, from processing comments about our freckles to recounting how someone rolls Black people fingers through our child's curly hair.
article_snippet: our wake up and go to bed black, and that makes a difference in this country.