But in the year since that speech – through campaign and convention, election and inauguration – Barack Obama hasn’t taken part in the discussion of race in America in any sustained way, the way he did that day in Philadelphia to get out of a campaign jam.

Obama supporters have defended this approach as “post-racial” — moving beyond clear lines of black and white, and the tired racial fights of years past to embrace a new way of solving problems broadly, not one ethnic group at a time…

But it’s an approach that leaves some of Obama’s black supporters wanting more – and some analysts saying Obama’s method is something of a cop-out, in a nation where racial questions still burn every day. It was Obama’s own attorney general Eric Holder, in fact, who said the U.S is a “nation of cowards” on race.