"The positive fact is that I have noticed, confirmed… the fact that the U.S. society is confronting racism."

It's a statement that raised my brow. But that is what Doudou Diene, the United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia told NPR’s Weekend Edition host, Scott Simon on Sunday.

Diene, charged with preparing a report on the state of racism in the US, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Canada and twenty other countries, cited the Democratic nomination of Senator Barak Obama, a black man, as sign that people in the US are finally doing the "internal work" needed to fight racism. He called it "a deep process of transformation." And so it finally begins, I thought. Here is more fodder for pundits who consistently sweep racism under the rug.

Read the rest of this article at AlterNet.