America may have a black man in the White House, but questions of race and the legacy of centuries of slavery and discrimination continue to smoulder in US society. From the top court in the nation to a popular Southern cook and a contentious murder trial, questions about how the country is handling problems of race are dominating headlines and online debate.
The decision by the Supreme Court, which on Tuesday struck down part of the historic Voting Rights Act, offers a lens to view the other race questions. The 1965 law was aimed at rooting out racial discrimination in voting by requiring nine states - all but one of them from a South scarred by slavery and segregation - to obtain advance approval from the federal Justice Department for changes to their election laws.
The five conservatives on the bench declared that the conditions that led to the law had improved and that federal oversight was no longer needed. "Our country has changed," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, citing higher rates of voter registration and turnout among African-Americans than whites in the affected states. "While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions."
According to The New York Times, the Supreme Court had "repeatedly upheld the law in earlier decisions, saying that the ... requirement was an effective tool to combat the legacy of lawless conduct by Southern officials bent on denying voting rights to blacks." The decision came just seven months after US elections in which conservative Republican officials in several states tried to require voters to show identification at the polls, in the name of fighting fraud. Left-leaning democrats alleged that such rules were targeted to unfairly burden legitimate voters lacking documents, who are disproportionately black or Latino, and overwhelming supported President Barack Obama.
It was also an election in which Obama, the first African-American president, won re-election with little suspense. This week, he led critics of the decision on the Voting Rights Act, saying he was "deeply disappointed" by the ruling. Meanwhile, an imbroglio broke out over television cook Paula Deen, who was ditched by numerous sponsors after her admission in a court deposition that she had used the hateful N-word.
She has insisted that she only used it once, decades ago, immediately after being robbed at gunpoint while working as a bank teller. But other allegations of racial insensitivity have emerged. White and grandmotherly, Deen, 66, had become the face of old-fashioned Southern cuisine on The Food Network. Cartoonist Rob Tornoe delivered a sharp-edged commentary with his illustration of three beaming judges addressing Deen, who is waving a Confederate flag. "We killed the Voting Rights Act because thoughts about race have changed," they say. "Isn't that right Paula?"
Race is at the centre of one of the most closely-watched trials in recent memory - the murder case against a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Florida who is charged with shooting to death unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin last year. The incident sparked widespread protests, and live coverage of the trial on cable news channels drowned other important stories such as Obama's visit to Africa or the saga of fugitive US intelligence leaker Ed Snowden.
The defence argues that it was a simple case of George Zimmerman defending himself after being attacked. Prosecutors allege that Zimmerman trailed Martin trailed because he was young and black, in an act of racial "profiling." The racial dynamic was complicated this week when a friend with whom Martin was telephoning just before his death testified that he described the man following him - the half-Latino Zimmerman - as a "cracker," a sometimes derogatory term for Southern whites. Blogger Brandon Jones proclaimed a thread through the weeks' news: "It is obvious from (the voting rights) ruling, and the Paula Deen and Trayvon Martin controversies that the more things 'change' the more they stay the same."
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