Finally US might be restarting conversation on racism

For long, US has ducked the hard questions about race and power

Seven years after electing the first African-American president, the United States is finally beginning the conversation about racism and history that Barack Obama's rise to prominence was supposed to spark. Over the last year and some, a series of horrific incidents of police brutality, in which predominantly white police forces assaulted and killed young African-American men, had galvanised much of the US into questioning how the militarisation - and, possibly, structural racism - of policing in that country could be reversed. And last week the problem of race relations burst into the headlines from a different, but equally tragic direction - when a young white supremacist opened fire on an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine worshippers, including four ordained priests, an 87-year-old woman, and a state senator.

There is no question that much continues to be wrong with race relations in the US, and these cleavages have been swept under the carpet - not least by the artificial "post-racial" feel-good ambience that swept the country after the election of Mr Obama. Real questions of the differential incarceration rate between various races, the wealth and opportunity gap, and so on, have not received the attention they have deserved. Meanwhile, tensions have grown as some African-American areas have become mixed-race - as is the case in downtown Charleston, which was majority African-American a couple of decades ago, but is no longer. The economic slowdown and the effects of international trade have also made poorer white Americans and African-Americans economic competitors. The US has long stood for liberal values domestically, if not always in its foreign policy. If it wishes to continue to occupy that moral high ground, it must undergo internal social and economic reform, just as it did in the 1960s.

What will have startled many is that there is every sign that this process may in fact have begun. Not just through the "Black Lives Matter" protests in largely liberal coastal cities over the past year, but in the response to the Charleston massacre from the historic heartland of racism: the American South. The states of the Old Confederacy have long clung to the history of the Civil War of the 1860s, fought over states' rights to keep slaves, as a source of regional pride. Dylann Roof, the Charleston terrorist (one Republican senator described him as a "racial Jihadist"), took inspiration from the Confederacy, as well as from the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa. In response and in shame, there has been a startling groundswell of support for the reduction in state promotion of the emblems and the history of the Confederacy. Starting with the Indian-American South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a swathe of prominent US lawmakers and leaders, including several prominent right-wing Southerners, have called for the taking down of Confederate flags and statues. This is wise, since many - not just in the US - see implicit state support for white supremacy in the presence of these symbols. More, it could count as the beginning of a moment when the US begins to ask itself the hard questions about race and power that it has ducked for long.