A great paradox of Obama’s America is that racism has been so thoroughly condemned that it only rarely receives public /*0attention. To some extent, the election of a black president relaxed what remained of our national focus on race matters, it triggered a prolonged self-congratulation and a deceptive notion that we had reached an ending, a resolution. Obama himself is, of course, a sophisticated, and very particular, thinker about race on a number of levels -- as a child of a mixed marriage, he saw race from the inside out and the outside in; as a local politician, he ran...