In an interview with West Virginia talk radio host Tom Roten yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul lamented that race relations seem to have “gotten worse” during Barack Obama’s presidency when “you would think we would have gotten beyond race, in a way” during his administration.

Roten, speaking of protests following police shootings of African American men in Oklahoma and North Carolina, told Paul that he thought “race relations have grown worse since we’ve twice elected a black U.S. president.”

“You know, I think we try to make everything about race and so we wind up with a lot of racial tension because of that,” the Kentucky Republican responded.

He added that there is “no question that African Americans have been on the receiving end of violence more than whites have” from police and that “the police have to do a better job at figuring out when they use deadly force.”

“It just seems like, though, that there’s a mindset that I don’t recall us having in this country eight years ago,” Roten said.

“It certainly hasn’t gotten better,” Paul responded. “You would think we would have gotten beyond race, in a way, and in many ways it seems to have gotten worse.”