Here’s some data on the issue of race.
From the Toronto Star:

Asked to make split-second decisions about whether black or white male figures in a video game were holding guns, people were more likely to conclude mistakenly that the black men were armed and to shoot them, a series of new studies reports.
The subjects in the studies, who were instructed to shoot only when the human targets in the game were armed, made more errors when confronted by images of black men carrying objects like cellphones or cameras than when faced with similarly unarmed white men. The participants, who in all but one study were primarily white, were also quicker to fire on black men with guns than on white men with guns.
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So to restate: a sample of people were tested with a videogame which required them to make a “shoot / don’t shoot” decision, and they were more likely to shoot with sketchy information if the person they were facing was African American, and they shot more quickly (i.e. spent less time deciding) if the person was African American.
Hmmm.
And from the N.Y. Times, via Calpundit:

To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites.
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So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men.
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The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names.
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Their most alarming finding is that the likelihood of being called for an interview rises sharply with an applicant’s credentials — like experience and honors — for those with white-sounding names, but much less for those with black-sounding names. A grave concern is that this phenomenon may be damping the incentives for blacks to acquire job skills, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates prejudice and misallocates resources.
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So, to restate, given a randomized set of resumes, those attached to African American sounding names are significantly less likely to get called in for an interview than the same resume attached to a name more likely to be white.
Now I’ve typically got some fairly harsh things to say about affirmative action, and about the ways that the African American political leadership has substituted entitlement and patronage for responsibility and service.
And I’ve been amused to find myself shocked, just shocked to meet the wife of a Midwestern, Jewish, arch-Republican co-worker and discover that she was black. (and note the photo of Instapundit’s future sister-in-law).
So the reality is that race remains an incredibly complex issue here.
I’ll say two things to close for now (I still owe a longer piece):
I can’t imagine a better time or place to be black than the United States in the 21st century;
As noted above, we still have some fairly significant issues to deal with.