The fatal police interactions with unarmed African American men, particularly with Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York City, sparked a national debate about law enforcement and race. The failure to indict the officers in those two cases spurred a national conversation on race and the equal application of justice. But let’s move past these two flashpoints, which play into what my Post colleague Eugene Robinson correctly calls our “spasmodic pattern” of dealing with race.

Evidence that race matters is all around us, quite literally. The folks at Vox earlier this month reminded us of a Southern Poverty Law Center list of the number of active Ku Klux Klan chapters in the United States. NewsOne turned that information into an interactive map. The racist and anti-Semitic hate group that fancies white sheets, cross burnings and has a history of other assorted acts of violence is active in 41 out of 50 states.

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No pun intended, but race colors how we view some issues. A new Post-ABC News poll shows how stark the divide is when it comes to law enforcement.

Only 1 in 10 African Americans says blacks and other minorities receive equal treatment with whites in the criminal justice system. Only about 2 in 10 say they are confident that the police treat whites and blacks equally, whether or not they have committed a crime.

In contrast, roughly half of all white Americans say the races are treated equally in the justice system, and 6 in 10 have confidence that police treat both equally.

The division is not just along racial lines. The survey also highlights the partisan nature of it. If you are a white Republican you are more likely to say the races are treated equally by police. If you are a white Democrat you are more likely to believe there is a difference in treatment.

And a column last week by Esther Cepeda on a study on the impact of language on how African Americans are perceived was as eye-opening as it was stunning. The name of the report says it all: “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks.’” Researchers Erika Hall, Katherine Phillips and Sarah Townsend conducted four experiments to see if whites made a distinction between “Blacks” and “African Americans.” Please take the time to read their study. It’s fascinating. But everything you need to know is in their abstract.

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We argue that the racial label Black evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status than the racial label African-American, and that Whites will react more negatively toward Blacks (vs. African-Americans). In Study 1, we show that the stereotype content for Blacks (vs. African-Americans) is lower in status, positivity, competence, and warmth. In Study 2, Whites view a target as lower status when he is identified as Black vs. African-American. In Study 3, we demonstrate that the use of the label Black vs. African-American in a US Newspaper crime report article is associated with a negative emotional tone in that respective article. Finally, in Study 4, we show that Whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when he is identified as Black vs. African-American. The results establish how racial labels can have material consequences for a group.

This study alone should dispel any notion that ours will ever be a “post-racial” society. Before that could happen, we Americans first would have to deal with our “current-racial” society. But as I’ve written many times, we would have to talk to each other one on one, face to face, in an intensely personal and uncomfortable exercise.

The multiracial hue to the demonstrations has given me hope that those conversations are happening a little bit more now. Small steps on the road to racial healing. Still, those talks have yet to become national in scope because they require a key element that is missing: trust. Until we can have a conversation grounded in trust we will never take that giant leap as a nation to that “post-racial” ideal where race doesn’t matter.