It was an honor to attend Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Eugene Robinson’s dinner presentation on race diversity in today’s America. His speech explored the research and insights that contributed to the creation of his recently published book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America.

Robinson reflected on how he felt on the 2008 election night: “I knew it was happening, but like many other African-Americans, I didn’t really believe it was going to happen.” Once President Obama was elected, he said he called his parents to let them know that they’d lived to see the election of the first African-American president. So much had happened, he said, since he grew up, on the “tail end of the Jim Crowe era in South Carolina.”