Simple answers

Simple answers are seldom right. Occasionally, they're right enough. While it's clear that the effects of racial apartheid redound to America's detriment even now, serious liberal thinkers have to acknowledge that social problems among African-Americans didn't all start with the slave trade. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., acknowledges this:

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted.

I've resisted this truth, too, but the persistent labelling of education as "too white" has convinced me that there are know-nothings in the black community who would prefer to keep everyone down if their street cred would otherwise become less valued. (This goes on in white working class communities, too, where it is a grave sin to git above your raisin'.)

Gates's own research doesn't show the correlation he thinks it shows between early property ownership and today's celebrity-level success. He has found that 15 of 20 black successes have ancestors who owned property before 1920, when only 25% of black families did own property.

Is this really a surprise? Put differently, what percentage of slave descendants today would have no property-owning ancestors if a quarter of their group held property three generations ago? The rough answer I get is about 10% (0.75^8). I would expect a control group to show a higher level of legacy than Gates's twenty selected successful people.

But this is just a rejection of an argument, not of Gates's opinion that there is a dire problem that concerns all Americans (and in many ways extends beyond race to social class). That problem is: What should we do about the persistent underclass?