We have overcome. We have reached the mountaintop. We have entered a post-racial era. We are witnessing a racial thaw. For many Americans--especially whites--the Obama inauguration is a moment of self-congratulation. That 43 percent of white voters pulled the lever for Barack Obama is seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the long struggle for civil rights has finally come to fruition.

Orlando Patterson offers a bracing corrective. Patterson does not for a moment gainsay the historic significance of Obama's victory (who could have predicted it even four years ago?). Obama's election is the culmination of a long and mostly successful black struggle for political recognition.

But Patterson reminds us that the mountaintop is still distant. Black and white Americans, especially in the major metropolitan areas of the Northeast and Midwest, still live apart to a degree that would have pleased all but the most intransigent advocates of Jim Crow. Largely because of racial segregation in the real estate market, African Americans have, on average, just one tenth the household wealth of whites. That gap is likely to widen because blacks have been disproportionately affected by the home finance crisis. In 2006 alone, more than half of home loans issued to blacks were subprime.

To a great extent in the United States, where you live decisively shapes your life chances. Because of persistent racial segregation, most blacks live in places that have been ravaged by disinvestment, job loss, and poverty. Public education is more segregated by race today than it has been since the late 1960s. The invisible lines that separate school districts are mostly racial. The black-white divide is reflected in grim health statistics (blacks suffer higher infant mortality rates, lower life expectancies, and more debilitating illnesses).

Our political responses to the ongoing racial crisis over the last forty years have been at best impotent, at worst malevolent. Many grassroots community organizers, especially in troubled inner-city communities, turned inward, focusing on small-scale redevelopment projects, on community empowerment and control of education, and on experiments that fostered racial separatism. They were usually well-intentioned, but they seldom addressed the root causes of racial inequality--and often made things worse. A handful of mostly self-appointed community leaders, captured the attention of the news media through theatrical protests that distracted attention from underlying problems. Mainstream Democrats, eager to win back disaffected working-class whites, distanced themselves from all but the most modest civil rights proposals and presided over a period of racial retrenchment. The rising economic tides of the late 1990s benefited African Americans, but did not substantially narrow the black-white gap. Conservatives proffered a politics of self-help and personal responsibility that ignored the devastating consequences of the massive economic restructuring that devastated inner cities and their residents.

Patterson argues that "the path to full equality ultimately entails private incorporation into mainstream American society." He is right. But the fundamental question is how? Civic unity, as Jim Sleeper and others advocate, is part of the answer. As I have argued in my new book Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North: "the most successful social movements have been broad-based, the result of coalition building across racial, religious, and economic divisions. Social movements have benefited most when they have organized locally, but networked regionally and nationally, and thought globally." Barack Obama learned that lesson as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side two decades ago. He stands on the shoulders of generations of black activists and coalition-builders like A. Philip Randolph who knew that blacks could not win equality if they fought alone.

But we cannot ignore the injuries of race. We err if we subsume the long-term effects of racial discrimination into a one-size-fits-all model of coalition politics. As Obama eloquently argued in his Philadelphia address on race, "the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations."

We must bridge the racial divide to address falling wages, high unemployment. and inadequate health care. But we can't stop there. We must also tackle the enduring legacies of racism--public and private--head on. So long as blacks and whites live in separate, unequal communities, attend separate, unequal schools, have unequal access to capital, and face racial discrimination on the job, iin the criminal justice system, and in the real estate and home finance markets, we will not come close to the mountaintop.

The most effective civil rights activists--past and present--have addressed the problems of racial injustice and economic inequality at the same time. It's time to get beyond the stale arguments about class versus race, about racial targeting versus economic universalism. That's the promise of an Obama presidency, but only if we stop singing the civil rights anthem "We shall overcome" in the past tense.