Barack Obama runs for president and implicitly reminds everyone how far the nation has traveled on race. But Natasha Pratt-Harris stands in front of her classes at Morgan State University and talks about the distance that remains on that journey.

She teaches sociology there, and simultaneously finishes her doctoral dissertation on the fate of black males who attend college versus those who are released from prison. She teaches the sociology of jails and prisons, and criminology, and the sociology of law enforcement. The statistics on such matters are deeply depressing.

“It’s a way of life for a lot of African-American males,” she was saying the other day. She is 33 years old, a graduate of Western High School and the University of Maryland, with a master’s degree from the University of Baltimore.

She grew up with a mother and twin siblings and an absent father, in a neighborhood near Morgan State, and she remembers people in the upstairs apartment dealing drugs, and a shooting at a neighborhood corner store, and there were relatives killed in an apparent drug dispute five years ago who left behind three small children to be raised by an aunt.

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But her own mother went to night school for a college degree, and Harris felt protected and stuck with her schooling and has two children and a husband, Carlos, who produces videos for Johns Hopkins Hospital. They live in north Baltimore County’s Rosedale area.

And she wonders, as she lectures to her students: Where is that fork in the road that leads some to reach for the White House and some to the jailhouse?

“I try to deal in empirical data,” she says, “and my students have life experiences that tell them why things happen. I had one student who wasn’t showing up for class. I asked him where he’d been. He said his parents were gone and his older brother was in prison. He had to find money to support his younger brother. He sold drugs, and he came to class when he could.

“The sociologists would call that a ‘cultural imperative.’ ”

It’s not the only one. We are years into the post-civil rights era, but shadows remain. Pratt-Harris says she has students who imagine their options limited, no matter how far their schooling takes them.

“They’ve been socialized to think that, whatever their circumstances, there are walls keeping them in. They can’t get beyond those walls, even if they’re not real. In their heads, the walls are real.

“And so much of it comes down to their families. They’ll talk about not having fathers. And that means no male role models. They’ll say, ‘My mom did everything. My dad wasn’t around.’ They’ll say it doesn’t bother them. But it does. And we have grandmothers raising children, instead of mothers. And aunts raising them.”

She talks about the man and wife in her husband’s family, killed in an apparent drug dispute five years ago. Their three children are now 10, 9 and 6. Their aunt is raising them.

“It’s tough growing up in any family,” she says. “Kids are self-conscious in ways we don’t think about. There was a mother-daughter event at school. My niece said she didn’t want to go with her aunt. Why not? She finally said, ‘She’s not my mother, I’m not going.’”

So begins the sense of feeling outcast. Pratt-Harris calls it a tug-of-war. There’s the “traditional” family, and there’s the modern reality.

“We’ve been dealt a hand,” she says, “that says, ‘This is what the traditional family is, and this is what we really have.’ Our reality is the extended family. And we have to figure out why some of us succeed inside that reality, and some don’t.”

Among those who have: Barack Obama, raised by his grandparents after his white mother and black father divorced. Pratt-Harris has written a children’s book about Obama. But it’s about family, not politics, and it attempts to make the connection between the youthful Obama and other children.

The book is interactive. There are pages asking children to write their own stories. One page, for example, says, “Senator Obama’s mother and father were married until he was two years old. Draw a picture of the people who took care of you when you were a baby.”

The message to the child is implicit: If your family has come undone, you are not alone. This man Obama had absent parents, and now he runs for president. He is the new model of possibilities once considered beyond reach, and beyond imagining.