I wanted Barack Obama to win. And I feared it. I worried that, if a black man were elected president of the United States, our nation would sink further into denial, and no one would listen to the message that I felt desperate to convey: We are not free of our racial history. To the contrary, a new caste system has been born again in America, a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world has ever seen. We are not saved. I was right to worry.
