Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s sweeping and sophisticated speech on race in America has now been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube. And, according to The New York Times [1], it has sparked a new conversation about race within many churches, synagogues and mosques, as well as universities and popular blogs around the country.

That dialogue is most welcome, and long overdue. But it begs the question whether our nation’s political leaders will take up the same call when it comes to discussing national policies on race relations and equal opportunity in this election year.

That conversation has languished in the decade since Bill Clinton’s Advisory Commission on Race succumbed to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, notwithstanding Hurricane Katrina and many other events that clearly called for a renewal of that conversation.

Obama’s speech highlighted many of the necessary elements for a policy conversation on race for the 21st century: the universality of bias and, often, understandable resentment; the continuing legacy of past discrimination; our increasingly multicultural reality; and the importance of rising together.

With examples ranging from black barbershop conversations to his white grandmother, Obama made the important point that all communities and, in fact, all of us as individuals, carry racial bias and stereotypes. Through that important acknowledgement—which is well-documented by social science research [2]—he reminded us that racial bias and misunderstanding belong to all of us, as part of the problem as well as the potential solution. While old-school racism and bigotry still exist in some quarters, the bigger challenge to opportunity comes from more subtle, deep-seated, and universal sources.

From a policy standpoint, that calls for a retooling our anti-discrimination laws to address not just explicit, intentional discrimination, but also more subtle and implicit biases that deny equal opportunity in criminal justice, health care, education, or other institutions. That those biases can emanate from people of any race or background is an obvious, but important, part of the mix.

At the same time, Obama correctly recognized that the legacy of explicit discrimination and segregation from America’s past continues to hamper the opportunity of many people of color today. Our schools are still separate and unequal 50 years after Brown. Legal and vigilante action last century that prevented minority entrepreneurship and homeownership lives on today in the significant racial disparities that exist in wealth and prosperity. Proactively addressing those continuing inequities is not reparations or retribution, but justice and opportunity.

Obama called on African Americans to “embrac[e] the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past,” and to bind “our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.”

This recognition calls for policy solutions that address the barriers to equal opportunity based on race while expanding opportunity for everyone in our country—for example, combining universal health care with training and guidelines that address institutional bias in the health care system. It means investing in education for all children while correcting the starkly unequal and inadequate educational resources facing too many children of color. And, as Obama noted, it means that African Americans—and all Americans—must continue to strive for our own self-improvement, just as the country must.

While Obama’s speech was largely about black-white tensions, he reminded his audience that today’s America is a multicultural one, with people of many races and from many backgrounds. Breaking out of the black-white paradigm and embracing the energizing diversity of a new America is an important part of our national future.

In the immigration context, for example, that means recognizing that thoughtful concerns about unauthorized immigration do not equate with racism, and that a pathway to citizenship must be combined with living wages and workplace protections for all workers. At the same time, it means acknowledging that bigotry is behind many extreme elements [3] of the anti-immigrant movement, and that more subtle fears about racial, cultural, and linguistic difference have often hampered honest and productive solutions to immigration challenges. A new policy conversation about immigration reform should begin with that recognition.

Of course, it’s not in Obama’s political interest to emphasize race or even equal opportunity policy issues in his campaign. As the first African American with a serious shot at the White House, part of his task is to avoid being pigeonholed as the race candidate. But his speech provided an important beginning. And, as he suggested, we all own the good, the bad, and the ugly of racial progress and obstacles in America. In this most political of years, we all have a responsibility to instigate a new policy conversation that moves our country forward.