Hailed upon his election as the final nail in racism’s coffin, Barack Obama has not delivered the hoped-for renaissance in African American communities where life on multiple fronts has turned worse as the president has moved on to other pressing issues, according to a leading scholar on race.

“Racial inequality continues to be an ugly sore festering in the heart of 21st century America, despite claims that it has become a post-racial society,” according to Northwestern University professor Aldon Morris. “Social conditions for poor and working-class blacks have actually worsened since Obama took office,” he wrote in the authoritative Contemporary Sociology.