America's racial challenge is a huge issue in the Trump-era. That may sound obvious, but it is actually a long way from the misplaced talk around 2008 that "Obama's election alone somehow cured America" of all the work left to do.

"American racism does not fade on its own or dissipate after a few breakthroughs, no matter how big." @AriMelber

As @arimelber explains, systemic racism would never end in one night. To understand that racism is systemically embedded in our laws and prisons and economy and in our brains is to understand that it endures by default unless it is explicitly uprooted and reformed.

That may be why even in this Trump-era, amidst blatant racism and the Obama backlash and comfort for white supremacists and proud boys, the incident that truly broke through was not about words or statues...

It was about the action of the government killing an unarmed Black American. A slow, lengthy execution of a life. A life that was legally and morally innocent...

A life that pleaded to breath, but was executed, in broad daylight before a crowd, over an excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds. It was the taking of that Black life, a Black life that mattered, in the now familiar, disturbing video.

This year's protests forced more Americans to face these realities.

But, as @AriMelber highlights, convictions are the exception.

Police routinely kill about one thousand people per year. That rate is continuing AT THE SAME PACE this year. There have been about 804 killings thus far, per @washingtonpost

It’s the same pace for charges. Before 2016, police could go years in a row without a single murder conviction, despite thousands of killings per year.

That has ticked up slightly in the most egregious killings caught on tape, with about ONE officer convicted per year over the past five years for on-duty shootings, per research by Phillip Stinson.

So just as some Americans rushed to overestimate how Obama's victory curbed racism, @arimelber argues it would be the *wrong lesson* this year to conclude the scrutiny on police brutality and racism is automatically curbing its systematic use.

While this is part of this year's protests, it's actually the smallest part of America's systemic racism problem.

Everything @AriMelber reported on in his special report stems from the sliver of the criminal justice system dealing with arrests-- the first part of police interaction. But the majority of the economic and racial injustice exists elsewhere...