Have our black families had the opportunity by now to recover from the experience of slavery? If so, then it’s time to stop focusing on slavery as an issue for the present day. If not, then we need to finally take our history more seriously. Either way, it’s time for people to learn the truth so that we can come together around appropriate, constructive solutions to our racial problems.

In a nutshell, Shotei, black families have never been able to recover from slavery. For a full century following abolition in 1865, blacks were treated to horrendous, blatant discrimination, both official and unofficial, tangible and intangible, violent and non-violent. During that same century, white families in this country benefited from vast federal programs which largely built the white middle class through financing for education, job training, home ownership, and small businesses.

In the relatively few years since the successes of the civil rights movement, we have made modest progress in closing the racial gap in this country. However, by any objective measure–for instance, income, education, home ownership or financial resources–only part of the gap which existed in 1865 has been closed, and much still remains to be done.

We can trace racial inequality in this country, year by year, from the end of slavery to today. It isn’t all about slavery, since the Jim Crow century played a vital part, too. But this simply isn’t a problem which magically appeared after the end of official discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s. It existed long before, and therefore has its roots in older history.

Blacks have had everything handed to them for so long now that they do not respect properity or anything other people have worked hard to get.

Shotei, I’ll ignore your stereotyped view that people of a particular race don’t work hard. And I’ll ignore your comment about “properity,” since I’m honestly not sure what you meant to say there.

However, the idea that “blacks have had everything handed to them for so long now” is patent nonsense.

I’m not even sure what you mean by that comment. Do you think, for instance, that programs like affirmative action have given blacks unearned advantages over whites? Or that welfare has benefited blacks more than whites? These are programs which have mostly benefited non-blacks, and have hardly made a dent in racial inequality, much less over-compensated for the relative disadvantage blacks suffer, on average, at the outset in this country.

Is there a white getto?

There certainly are, Shotei. (I hope you’re aware that the word “ghetto” isn’t specific to black neighborhoods, and in fact originally referred to a particular white community.)

Now, if you’re saying that there are problems distinctive to some black neighborhoods in this country, you’re right. Why is that? Generations of poverty and racial discrimination help to account for much of that; anyone can see that the end of official discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t magically transform those neighborhoods into one with generations of first-class public investment.

why was it bad? Because no one took care of thier own section of it.

That’s not true, Shotei. This is about a lack of public investment in “minority” neighborhoods, going back many generations. This is about the consequences of poverty, which can be seen in any poor urban neighborhood, regardless of race.

It doesn’t cost much to pick up trash in the front yard or mow the grass ….

Do you really think that the problems of race, the ones being blamed on our long history of slavery and discrimination, can be illustrated by homes with grass that isn’t mowed often enough?

The important question is: why? Why are blacks more likely to be “on the dole,” as you put it?

The overwhelming factor, of course, is that blacks in this country are disproportionately poor.

This disturbing fact is, in turn, primarily a consequence of our nation’s history of slavery and brutal racial discrimination. Many people like to say that blacks are more likely to be on public assistance, but fail to admit that this history is the major cause.