For the mother of Tyre Nichols, the fact that five Memphis police officers charged with beating her son are also Black has compounded her sorrow as she tries to cope with his violent death at age 29.

“It makes it even harder to swallow,” RowVaughn Wells said in an interview last week, “because they are Black and they know what we have to go through.”

Like most self-perpetuating systems, systemic racism masquerades as the norm. But as the history of housing discrimination illustrates, it’s a human-made system, not a natural one.

Becoming a first-generation homebuyer was a meaningful step for Erin. Her parents came to the United States from Cape Verde and had never been able to purchase a house. She was excited for the stability it would provide and the financial investment in her future.

President Biden says America is not a racist country, but that Black Americans have been left behind and "we have to deal with it."

In an interview on NBC's Today show that aired Friday, Biden was asked about the remarks Wednesday by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who delivered the Republican response to the president's address to a joint session of Congress.

Scott, the Senate's only Black Republican, said that "America is not a racist country" and warned that "it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present."

A few years ago, I ran a study with a colleague, Daniel Newark, of how Americans think about test score gaps in education. It featured a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of adults. The study design let us test for differences in how Americans see Black-white, Hispanic-white, and wealthy-poor gaps. The study’s main finding was that Americans are far more concerned about, and willing to address, wealth-based gaps than race- and ethnicity-based gaps.

This report illustrates how racial discrimination in the administration of justice systematically denies certain people their human rights because of their colour, race, ethnicity, descent (including caste) or national origin. Based on research conducted by Amnesty International in recent years, it shows that members of ethnic minorities often suffer torture, ill-treatment and harassment at the hands of the police. In many parts of the world they face unfair trials and discriminatory sentencing which puts them at increased risk of harsh punishments, including the death penalty.

The course of American racial and ethnic politics over the next few decades will depend not only on dynamics within the African-American community, but also on relations between African Americans and other racial or ethnic groups. Both are hard to predict. The key question within the black community involves the unfolding relationship between material success and attachment to the American polity. The imponderable in ethnic relations is how the increasing complexity of ethnic and racial coalitions and of ethnicity-related policy issues will affect African-American political behavior.

The United States has made significant progress in recent decades on eliminating racism and structural discrimination, but there is still a long way to go and much work to be done to combat all forms of racism and racial discrimination, from the criminal justice system and the housing market to the education system and beyond.