Racism remains a blight on United States society, President Barack Obama says, speaking after the killing of nine African-Americans in a South Carolina church.
Mr Obama refuses to accept the latest violence is ''the new normal'' but has called for a national moment of soul-searching over gun violence after last week's mass shooting in Charleston.
From a distance, Mr Obama seems powerless to halt the spread of violence and a seemingly deepening divide of racism in the US.
More than 11,000 Americans were killed by gun violence in 2013 alone.
If Congress had passed some common sense legislation after Newtown, when a group of children were gunned down in their own classroom (reforms that 90% of the American people supported) there would in all likelihood be more Americans alive today.
Earlier, Charleston-accused Dylann Roof (21) appeared in court to face murder charges, showing no emotion as relatives of the victims addressed him directly.
Most of the families offered forgiveness to Roof, who has been identified through social media postings as a racist.
(Just how his activities on one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet escaped attention from American agencies paranoiac about security is a question needing an urgent answer.)
The largely African-American church has a deep history of forgiveness, rooted in faith and tied into the history of white supremacy in the US.
The ability to forgive has emerged as both an act of mercy and a tool against oppression.
Roof had been welcomed into the church's bible study group with open arms before he opened fire while those attending had their heads bowed in prayer.
Disturbingly, Roof has since been described by a white Republican senator as simply a ''whacked-out kid''.
This is a man who has been shown burning the US flag, waving the Confederate flag - which, by the way still flies at the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina - and wearing flags of racist regimes in South Africa and the former Rhodesia.
Compare the behaviours of Roof with the actions of a white police officer who broke up a pool party recently, in the process of which he broke the jaw of a young African-American female by putting his foot on her head and pressing down - hard.
Remember too that in the past year, unarmed black males have died at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island, North Charleston and Cleveland.
And pause for thought at the fact the US has an African-American president who cannot talk about race without being exposed to hostility.
If current trends in the US continue, one in three black men are expected to spend time in prison at some point in their lives.
The global financial crisis wiped out twice as much black wealth as it did white, and the raw data numbers are even more stark.
Post-recession median household wealth for a white family in 2014 was nearly $US142,000 ($NZ205,800), down from $US192,500.
The median wealth for black households has fallen to $US11,000 from $US19,200.
There are 1.5 million black men ''missing'' in the US because they are either dead or in prison.
There has been a near constant denial in the US that racism really exists.
There seems an incapacity among white Americans to see themselves as bad people, and the rush of white Americans disassociating themselves and other whites from Roof's violence is testament to that fact.
Even the treatment by authorities of Roof has been different to that of many African-Americans: after his arrest he was seen wearing a bullet-proof vest, and he has been transported privately.
Mr Obama speaks of the heartache, sadness and the anger the shootings elicited, but Americans cannot bring themselves to force through changes needed in their laws and society.
Guns can be bought in the country's largest chain of stores while chocolate eggs containing toys are banned as being dangerous for children.
The massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is something entirely different from the police killings of African-American men.
But it too has become a flashpoint, posing questions about the racial divide in the US.
