Another terrible race motivated attack.

[Montmorency]

You're proving my point. You've been conditioned to think of any and all racial disparities as purely a function of socioeconomic condition without bothering to apply, pardon my repetition, a rational, logic-based approach to verifying your assumption.

Not quite. Leaving aside the vociferous asseverations and ideological commitments of both broad "sides", the facts are as follows:

1. Since the end of the Reconstruction era, Blacks whether staying in the South or migrating to the North or West have been systematically exploited for their labor while being officially or quasi-officially segregated into under-invested slums. Both segregation and under-investment together created inherently weak and unstable communities.
2. Today, many large Black (especially urban) communities fare poorly on socioeconomic indicators, and overall crime rates are unacceptably higher than for most other possible groupings of comparable order-of-magnitude in population size.
3. Non-Blacks tend to look down on or ware Blacks, meaning that a widespread cultural bias (manifesting primarily with respect to the heuristics of skin color/facial morphology and voice quality/speech accent) leads to additional disadvantages for Blacks in their relationships with, for example, private employers and the judiciary at-large.

What we should take away from the three points above is that American political and civic institutions essentially 'ruined' the Black-American population through short-sighted policies based upon fear and contempt. The urban pathologies of the 1970s and 1980s did not spontaneously emerge from any post-war (i.e. WW2) federal policy or from the civil rights movement; they had been burgeoning from the end of the Civil War, and were only ever contained by severe repression and the coercive capacity of the non-Black population. The real problem today in concentrated Black communities underlying poor performance and outcomes, leaving aside whatever one may say of the acute effects of continuing under-investment or hasty discrimination, is that Black communities formed in the wake of emancipation and migration were by design so weak that very little sense of communalism developed, and inasmuch as it did it tended to be tamped by the political and economic disfavors done over the years. So now, then, many Blacks tend to be radically-individualistic. The Conservative/Libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s has only reinforced these tendencies.

Now we are getting to the crux. The most fundamental disease affecting underperforming Black communities is quite simply the very same disease that is constantly and publicly tearing at the very fabric of American civil society. It surprises me that even though some rightist commentators like to point out the relative social conservatism of "Black America", they have not hit upon this point, namely that there is really very little separating a Black "gangbanger living the thug life" and the usual suspects constituting the Tea Party. All the major ideological narratives offered in the reported discourse on race in America today are therefore wrong.

The etiology is quite clear, and many of its corollaries persist even today. No 'contained' reform, reparation, or rehabilitation targeting either some designated "powerful" or "privileged" group, or some "deficient" or "disenfranchised" group, can possibly produce any meaningful social change or useful outcomes. The "problems" affecting Black America are utterly inextricable from those affecting America as a whole, so splitting hairs about differences in specific "values" or whatever will not prove persuasive.

Only a wholesale reconstitution and reorganization of the political, economic, and administrative structure of the United States could possibly bring Blacks (or for that matter Aboriginals or Latinos, but by their own idiosyncratic histories that I will defer on) 'up to par', so to speak.

There's no real reason to believe that such a thing would occur in the medium-term however, so right now all we actually have is sanctimonious bloviation between serried ranks of fools, charlatans, and malingerers.

I don't really even give a crap about political or social issues anymore: you're all a bunch of BSers BSing BSers. All I have now is my (thankfully) impotent pedantry...