As someone who came of political age in the 1960s, I never cease to marvel at how great an impact my generation had on technological change and how minimal an effect on our social problems. Given our passions and ideals at the time, I thought things would be very different. Who would have dreamed that we would rise to the challenge of a changing global economy with new technology and new ways to organize business, but not purge our companies' racially biased hiring and promotion policies? That with our intense antiwar and civil rights movements, we would end up building the most technologically sophisticated military machine in history, but fail to bring inner-city black youth into America's mainstream? That we would launch the information revolution, but not undo the inequality between blacks and whites?

This combination of technological success and social failure poses a major question – one that many of us feel compelled to unravel. Why, with my generation's once ardent commitment to building a just nation and our talent for making such significant changes in other aspects of life, were we not able to overcome our racial problem?

For the past half century, the most important symbol of the problem has been economic inequality. This is not the only way the race issue manifests itself.