An invisible, new Jim Crow casts a looming shadow over America. After many of the black and brown children of this country either graduate or drop out from low performing schools, they will be stopped, arrested, convicted, and sentenced at higher rates than the white children who grew up across town. When they are released from prison with felony on their records, they will not be able to vote, employers will refuse to hire them, and the government will be able legally to refuse to give them public benefits. The New Jim Crow lives.

“All men are created equal.” Our nation was founded on these words 238 years ago. But with these words hanging in the balance, America has been the ground for the genocide of its native people, the systematic kidnapping and enslavement of human beings, a legalized caste system that prevented people of color from voting, working, learning, and living with the freedom and dignity that every human being deserves, and today a disguised continuation of that caste system.

To deny the existence of America’s race problem is to perpetuate it. The word “slavery” is not once mentioned in the United States Constitution prior to the 13th Amendment. Americans stood idly by, feigning ignorance, as the Southern United States created a system of legal discrimination as bad as slavery for an entire century after emancipation. Today, those who pretend that America is post-racial preserve that legacy of denial.

I do not write this to say that America has made no progress. We have made progress. But progress is not enough. We must confront racism to truly move past it, and that begins when those who continue to deny it decide to wake up.

Dennis O. Ojogho ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Winthrop House.