Obama was asking Americans to see the Zimmerman case through a different lens. He said, “It’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.”

What is this experience and history? The president spoke in deeply personal terms about how it feels to live in a society that looks at you as a criminal when you have done nothing more than be a black man. He lamented a justice system that likely would not have extended the same benefit of doubt to Trayvon Martin that George Zimmerman received. I’ll add that if Martin had Zimmerman’s record — an arrest for violence against a police officer and a restraining order for domestic violence — there is no question he would have been arrested on the spot and cast as a dangerous thug.

Many white Americans don’t want to hear this. They prefer to pretend that justice is blind and racism is ancient history.

Never mind that there are African Americans alive today who grew up under segregation and another generation who grew up hearing about it from their parents.