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You want America to talk about race, Mr. President. Good idea. You want us to see this complex issue as more than black and white. Bad idea. At least for now. Yes, racism is complicated. Yes, Asian-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans all face forms of discrimination. But there's no such crime as "driving while Asian" or "driving while Native American." There is, however, the longstanding crime in communities across America known as "driving while black" -- a crime that leads to humiliation, harassment and death.

It was deadly last year in St. Petersburg, Fla., when a white officer shot a black motorist. Riots erupted.

It was deadly just outside my home of New Haven two months ago, when a white officer from an all-white suburban force tried to stop a black motorist. When the unarmed driver fled, a crew of cops followed him across town lines and then shot him to death. The story didn't even make national news. Why? Because such incidents have sadly become commonplace, dulling our sense that they are unnecessary and racially motivated.

Law enforcement's inability to deal with blacks as anything other than criminals is demonstrated again and again. This month, an Orlando Sentinel study showed that central Florida sheriffs are six times more likely to stop black drivers than white drivers on Florida's turnpikes. Yet blacks constitute only 16.3 percent of the drivers. In an overwhelming number of cases, no drugs or any evidence of criminal activity was found in vehicles the sheriffs stopped.

The crisis that led you to convene a national race chat, Mr. President, is the same one that led to the formation of the Kerner Commission three decades ago; a crisis in policing, a black and white crisis. The crisis remains today what the Kerner Commission called it in its 1968 report: the existence of two Americas -- one black, one white, separate and unequal; whose underlying tensions are ignited by an oppressive racist police culture.

Six years ago, Warren Christopher came to a similar conclusion. You remember Warren Christopher, Mr. President. As secretary of state, you sent him places like Bosnia and the Middle East to arbitrate their warring ethnic groups. Before you hired him, he spent some time in Los Angeles studying a similar problem that finally flashed on the public's radar only after riots were sparked after the exoneration of the white cops who mercilessly beat a black man named Rodney King.

Here's what Christopher found: "Witness after witness testified to unnecessarily aggressive confrontations between LAPD officers and citizens, particularly members of minority communities."

Christopher concluded that community policing is one key to a solution. I couldn't agree more -- as long as we understand what we mean by "community policing." We don't mean "order maintenance," the current rage where crime is allegedly reduced by turning cops loose in poor neighborhoods, making them an occupying force that harasses poor and black people. As we're seeing in some cities, that strategy is costing more black people's lives and violating the rights of many innocent people. Furthermore, it fails to enlist black communities as a partner in long-term crime reduction.

The longer we continue to bring African-Americans into the criminal justice system in a humiliating way -- through arrests, searches and chases -- the longer a growing underclass will remain a separate, unreachable society within our own, breeding distrust.

You've said that an apology for slavery may be part of the discussion. Perhaps a more appropriate apology would be for America's failure to accept the responsibilities of injustice and disenfranchisement left in slavery's aftermath. All races will benefit from a remedy to the polarization of black and white America.

Let's ask how we can bring more African-Americans into the criminal justice system as lawyers, judges and cops -- not as suspects and inmates.

Let's ask how we can turn our police into partners with our black communities, with the vast majority of those who follow the law, and even with the minority who doesn't.