"Is the American Civil War still not over?"

This was the headline on a Chinese news website last week, reacting to the debate over the Confederate flag in the United States, in the wake of the racially motivated shooting of nine people in a historic black church.

A little extreme, but it does capture aptly sentiments raised by recent events in the US - a sense that race relations here are firmly stuck in the past.

President Barack Obama said as much after the shootings, even invoking a word that has become taboo: "Racism, we are not cured of it. And it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say 'nigger' in public. That's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior."

But is the race problem here as bad as it appears and why does it seem like so little progress has been made in centuries?