Race relations in America: Getting Worse, Getting Better, Stagnant?

What I have found is that it's not so much how you look as how you act. Act like an upstanding citizen you generally get treated as one. Act like a gangbanger punk, again, you get treated as one. Now that is not a perfect explanation, and yes, racism still exists, but how you present yourself goes a long way into how people react to you.

As far as race relations go, we are way better than we were in the past. However, it's not perfect and we still have a ways to go. However, I think people use the convenient excuse of racism to cover their personal agendas. And it's nowhere near as bad as the media likes to make it out to be. Remember, the media's job is to sell a story and create viewership. You can't do that when you tell folks, "things are generally OK....."

Of course not! I'm a middle-class, middle-aged African American, but when I call the cops, they know that I'm a "taxpayer" and call me "sir".

When I was a teenager in public housing, the cops never called me "sir."

When it comes to "Race", I think we tend to ignore the underlying problem and focus on it's effects. Homo Sapiens (Humans) are a predatory, territorial species of animal with an atavistic instinct toward tribalism. Now how each human defines its tribe can differ. For some it's race, for some, family, for others it's religion, for some, political party, it can go on and on ad infinitum. Now, so long as we keep classifying ourselves by race, we subconsciously create "other". The only way we are ever going to get past this is to acknowledge that our species is only one race, human. All the rest is genetic irrelevance. Skin color, hair color, none of it make us different races. One race, with aesthetic variance. Nothing more.

I'm starting to suspect we need an external threat to the species to get us to band together...