Have "race relations" gotten worse, or more publicized, since Obama?

[TNF]

I don't know if they've gotten worse. They've never really been great, and the Great Recession has made things worse because it's had a disproportionate effect in black America. Combine that with four decades now of more or less open racism on the part of the American ruling class (be it the drive to end busing in the 1970s, the war on drugs/war on crime in the 1980s, or ending 'welfare as we know it' in the 1990s) and you get a very volatile environment that leads to the kind of uprisings we've seen in Ferguson and Baltimore over the past year or so.

The public is perhaps more aware of it because of social media and because we have a black President (which is supposed to mean we live in a 'post-racial' society according to the media), I'd say. Things have probably not been this bad for black people in America since the particularly bad race relations of the late 19th - early 20th century (1890-1930). We are more segregated than we were before the civil rights struggles of the 1950s-60s, blacks continue to not make anywhere near what whites make, and the levers of the economy remain in the hands of a predominately white capitalist class with an interest in only making surface modifications to a system of exploitation and oppression that increasingly views black Americans as a surplus population in need of either incarceration or elimination.