I ask this question for the Salon readership, many of whom are probably convinced that the Republican party is made up entirely of racists. That's not true, of course. It's amazing, for example, how many people on the right have for years been up in Harlem spending their money and their time trying to help the kids, including one whose name would be very familiar to you. I won't either. One of their mistakes is to confuse moral issues with causal issues.
People often attribute things to the legacy of slavery, for instance.
But many of the things that are attributed to the legacy of slavery really were not as bad a hundred years ago as they are today. In the book I mention marriage rates and rates of labor-force participation. D.C. A hundred years ago, there were only four academic high schools in Washington, D.C., three white and one black. There were some standardized tests administered, and the black high school came in ahead of two of the three white high schools. Now, it was certainly true, at that time and for a long time after, that Washington was a racially segregated and racially discriminatory town.