On another level, it is not simply a function of law. Race is a function of heart as well. We each have to look into our own lives and ask ourselves, do you really see somebody who is an individual, who is deeper than skin color or eye shape, but who the person really is? Our challenge as a country is to be able to do that. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to fulfill the promise of our democracy, the ideals of our founders. And I believe that this is the fundamental moral challenge for our country.

Race relations in America are never simple. When confronted with the legacy of fear surrounding the issue of race, what can we do beyond deploring violence, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, toughening hate crime laws? How can we peel back the layers of denial and defense that all races bring to the table of multiracial dialogue? How can we overcome our divisions to get to a time when, in Toni Morrison's words, "race exists, but it doesn't matter"?

For starters, we can look deeper into the soul of America.

In the summer of 1994, I was reminded that slavery was our original sin and race remains our unresolved dilemma and that the bombers were back. From an urban church in Knoxville, Tennessee, to countless rural church burnings in South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Alabama, the flames and the hatreds of racism burned again. Just as they did in 1982, when Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American, was bludgeoned to death in Detroit by two unemployed auto workers who blamed their layoffs on Japan and could not see beyond eye shape to recognize Vincent Chin as an American. Just as they did last summer in Jasper, Texas, when an African American named James Byrd was "chained to a pick-up truck and dragged along a country road until his body literally was torn apart." Just as they did last year in Buffalo, New York, when a group of Black teenagers attacked a white man who was gay and stomped him to death. Violence is often just below the surface of race relations in America and fear follows as sure as the night follows the day.

While many legal barriers are down, divisions still remain, but they are divisions of the heart more than of the law. The law is only a framework. It cannot control the most important things in life. It can't improve and enrich all the ways that we relate to human beings of a different race. The law can tell people what's right for them and then force them to do it, but it can't change the way they feel.

In running for President, I am betting that far more than a majority of people in America want to achieve a deeper racial unity. I'm betting that the goodness that's in each of us can win out over our more base impulses and that together we can unleash our national potential and live the promise of our Declaration that "all men are created equal."

For me the quest for racial unity remains the defining moral issue of our time. It's the reason I first ran for the public office. I can still remember sitting in the Senate galley as a college intern one hot June night in 1964 and watching the Civil Rights act pass -- the one that desegregated public accommodations -- and thinking something happened here that made America a better place tonight for all Americans and maybe someday I can be here to help make America a better place.

We are truly at a time when we will all advance together or each will be diminished. Our path ahead cannot be clear if we believe the journey has been completed. Denial of the distance we must travel will never allow us to vanquish racial discord from our hearts. By honestly accepting one another, we can get to a new place where fear and hostility give way to the acceptance of goodness in each of us no matter what race.

Only leadership will get us there. From the President, it starts with making sure that everyone knows just how important this issue is to him, and how fundamental it is to our nation's future.

When Ronald Reagan was President, everyone knew that if you wanted to please the boss, you cut taxes, increased military spending and fought communism. If I am President, I want one thing to be known: if you want to please the boss, one of the things you'd better show is how in your department or agency you've furthered tolerance and racial understanding.

When I was in Iowa earlier this year, I spoke at a diversity forum at the University of Iowa with an audience of mostly white students. Later that evening, in the home of two professors, a woman asked me, "Why are you speaking about the need for racial progress to a group of white Iowans?" And I answered, "Why not to you? I talk about it everywhere I go."

I will continue to talk through this campaign about the importance of deciding whether we will be a collection of 265 million individuals, or 265 million individuals living together as one nation. One nation -- not immigrants and natives, not urban and suburban and rural. One nation. Indivisible -- not pitted group against group, English-speaking versus Spanish-speaking, Black versus white, but indivisible. One nation -- where all men and all women are created equal, and where each advances and prospers, not because of what they are, but because of who they are, as individuals and as part of that one nation.