It's so frustrating reading your messages, because you seem so close to seeing the bigger picture, but there's this huge, racism-denying wall preventing you from getting there.

Yes, the path out of poverty is indeed similar to the path out of racism. That's because, and pay close attention here, African Americans were deliberately impoverished, by law, for the entirety of American history, until 56 years ago.

The average black family has one tenth the wealth of the average white family. One tenth. Yet at the same time, Nigerian immigrants, for example, are coming to the US and outearning white people. So what's happening here?

Well, the African Americans who have been in America since slavery, or even since segregation, they face much greater obstacles to success because they have no generational wealth, they're stuck in communities that have poor education and high crime, and their situation is denied or ignored a) because it's shameful, and b) because people like you insist on saying "Oh, but things are okay right now, so the previous 400 years can't possibly have an effect on whether they succeed.

As I think I said to you in another conversation, racism, and specifially its history, doesn't affect all black people equally. That wealth disparity I mentioned earlier isn't because black people are lazy or stupid or mired in a victim mentality. At least not any more than white people are. Black immigrants are raising that average wealth.

The issue is that black Americans were prevented from building wealth, and had the wealth they did build deliberately burned to the ground, for centuries. We need to think specifically about those black people to understand why talking only about racism in the present is missing the point.

It's like standing on somebody's neck for 400 years, and then finally stepping off, and saying, "Okay, you can breathe just as well as everybody else now, right? Why aren't you running as fast and doing as well as everybody else? Stop being such a victim."