Several years ago the O.J. Simpson murder case dominated the news in the US. It was when the not guilty verdict in the criminal trial was announced that white Americans realised something that black Americans have known for generations: blacks and whites live in two different Americas.
A white college professor, teaching a racially mixed class in Brooklyn, New York, stood in shock as her black students rose from their seats and cheered at the verdict.
A white claims officer at an insurance company sat dumbfounded as the same thing happened in her office. These were co-workers she thought she knew. How could they cheer a not guilty verdict even when they thought Mr Simpson had indeed committed the murders?
The answer was quite simple. It was pay-back time, and Mr Simpson unwittingly became a symbol for all the blacks who have been mistreated by big city police departments.
His acquittal, largely due to the racist comments made by one of the Los Angeles Police Department's officers, was seen as a victory.
There are countless studies that show how prevalent racial discrimination is in the US. Last year two class-action lawsuits were unveiled in Nashville, Tennessee, against two of the nation's most prominent automobile finance companies. The cases were filed under seal in 1998 but were unsealed on legal motions by the New York Times and the ABC News.
The lawsuits accused the General Motors Acceptance Corporation and the Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation of participating in lending arrangements with car dealers that have resulted in blacks paying higher finance charges than whites on dealer-arranged loans for buying cars. Both companies have denied that their finance charges are discriminatory. The cases are ongoing.
Also last year, Coca-Cola Company agreed to pay more than $156 million to resolve a federal lawsuit brought by black employees. It was the largest settlement ever in a racial discrimination case.
The lawsuit accused Coke of erecting a corporate hierarchy in which black employees were clustered at the bottom of the pay scale, averaging $26,000 a year less than white workers.
As redress, the settlement provided as many as 2,000 current and former black salaried employees with an average of $40,000 in cash, while the four plaintiffs whose names are on the lawsuit received up to $300,000 apiece.
"There's going to be fundamental change at the Coca-Cola Company," Ms Kimberly Gray Orton, a plaintiff who worked for Coca-Cola for 13 years, told the New York Times. She said she made less than the white workers she supervised.
But perhaps the most volatile aspect of race relations in the US lies in the country's law enforcement agencies. Scores of police departments have been accused of "racial profiling", a practice of identifying criminal suspects based on race.
In practical terms, this means that blacks are often stopped more than whites for routine traffic checks. In affluent neighbourhoods such as Beverly Hills, California, blacks know they are almost certain to be stopped and questioned by police if they are driving in the area.
The practice is so prevalent that a federal Bill called the "End Racial profiling Act of 2001" was recently introduced in Congress by a group of senators, including Senator Hillary Clinton. The Act would ban the practice.