The United States again finds itself weathering public anger over the killing of black men by the police.

What has made the latest incidents pronounced is the fact that they occurred a day apart in two different states.

On Tuesday, 37-year-old Mr Alton Sterling was shot dead by cops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The following day, in the St Paul suburb of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, Mr Philando Castile, described as a well-liked 32-year-old cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori school, was the victim of police bullets — four we are told — during a traffic stop.

In Mr Sterling’s case, a police statement claimed that the cops received a tip from an anonymous caller who said they had been threatened by a man with a gun. Mr Sterling, we are told, was selling CDs outside a convenience store where he was confronted by the policemen.

A video shot by a witness and circulated online showed two policemen ordering Mr Sterling to the ground. However, he remained standing and the police wrestled him onto the roof of a car and then to the ground. While he was pinned down by the officers, one pulled a gun and shot him four times at close range.

In the second incident, Mr Castile’s girlfriend streamed a live video on Facebook for the world to see the gruesome aftermath of his killing by the police. In the video, Ms Diamond Reynolds describes being pulled over for a broken tail light and says her boyfriend had told the police he was carrying a gun for which he was licensed.

Mr Castile, she said, was reaching for his wallet when he was shot.

Like so many similar shootings in the United States last year, the two this week predictably triggered street protests and, most naturally, revived the issue of race relations in a country that is being directed toward a xenophobia-fuelled path of division by Mr Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for this year’s presidential election.

Yesterday, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton correctly stated that nobody should be shot and killed for a tail light being out of function, then posed the question that was most likely on the minds of most well-thinking Americans: “Would this have happened if those passengers would have been white?”

Weighing in on the issue, President Barack Obama pointed to statistics that, he said, showed that African-Americans are being shot by police or arrested at more than twice the rate of white Americans, thus demonstrating that concerns about bias in US law enforcement are real.

“When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if it’s because of the colour of their skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us,” President Obama said.

He is, of course correct.

It is not an easy problem to fix. However, our hope is that the overwhelming good that we know exists in the United States will not relent to a mindset that belongs to the past and which the American people fought so hard to defeat.