Pretty simple really.  Black families make a much lower wage than the average white family:

I used the median plot because it better captures the real state of a mid-range black family than a mean.  Data’s a few years old, but there hasn’t been a massive spike in black incomes.

So, if the US minimum wage is $7.25/hr, assuming a 40 hour work week, you get $15k.  That’s about half of the black family’s average earnings.  If you go to the statistics in the “income and demographics” section here, sourced from the US Census bureau (I’m not going to try to send you to the sources there directly because I’ve found them to be generally poorly visualized and harder to sift through, but this comports with everything I’ve seen), the African American population is heavily concentrated in the lower three quartiles of the income distribution.  Combined with the information early in that section that indicates a much higher proportion of black households have one earner, and you can reasonably assume about half of black households are making $17/hr or less.  With the White income distribution and median much higher, it’s quite clear that a much smaller proportion of White households make wages that low.

Now, if you raise the minimum wage, let’s say to $15/hr, the Democratic talking point, businesses don’t just hand over the money.  For example, in local franchises (a very competitive market which hires a lot of low wage workers), you aren’t seeing massive profit margins.  Same for most jobs that need unskilled labor - they don’t pay a lot, but the people running things aren’t generally making money hand over fist.  And, even if they were, how many business owners do you know who would take a large pay cut and ignore it?  The Dems like to rant about CEO pay, but even if you cut that, it wouldn’t raise average worker’s pay appreciably.  So, you raise costs, businesses will have to cut costs elsewhere, and that generally is in personnel.  They will hire fewer people, maybe cut hours, and be pickier about who works for them.  And do you think it’s generally white collar workers impacted?  Nope, apart from some somewhat unnecessary positions that get cycled (think overgrowths in HR or similar), businesses don’t generally operate with too many accountants or food scientists, for example.  They cut those it can have a big impact on the bottom line (yes, even accountants).  Cutting minimum wage workers, on the other hand, will have less impact - I’ve worked fast food, you could get by with fewer good employees instead of the larger cohort of lower skilled employees they often employ.  So it’s the low paid people who will be impacted.  And about half of black households fall into the band where a hike in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour will have large labor market ripples.  More white peoples might be impacted, but they’re also a much larger part of the population, so the impact on black families will be quite disproportionate.  Given the large percentage of those families who are near this line already, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that there are at least some people on public assistance who are there because they aren’t employable at $7.25 an hour - their work isn’t worth that much to an employer.  And the percentage of the black population in that category is a lot higher than the white population’s.

We can argue why things are that way.  You can tell me of issues in black communities that we can’t fix for them.  I’m not going to argue it’s all the government’s fault or deny people’s personal responsibility.  But the fact of the matter is that things are this way and have been for a very long time, and the minimum wage was made to impact the black community more, and it continues to impact them more.  It’s just a statistical fact.  And, unlike loan standards, something the Obama Administration targeted, there is no rational reason to set the minimum wage at this level.  It’s entirely arbitrary.  Banks set standards to avoid costly loan defaults - the minimum wage is selected by politicians to sound nice and get votes from well meaning white ladies who haven’t made minimum wage since they got out of college, and who have never had any idea what it’s like to live on minimum wage.  It’s arbitrary, and it hurts the people it’s designed to help.

Minimum wage laws hurt low income households, I agree, but we are talking about systemic racism - which is something that white people intentionally do specifically to black people.  If 90% of black people vote for democrats because, among other things, they promise to raise the minimum wage, how can you blame that on systemic racism?   It's economic ignorance and pandering, for sure, but it is not racism.  The dems push minimum wage hikes to buy votes from anyone selling, regardless of color, not to keep black people down.

Everytime I hear systemic racism, think of somebody driving the wrong way of the interstate and there's a system of making all the other cars drive the wrong way vs realizing they are doing the wrong thing

Two separate issues.  I never said there was systemic racism (not in the way the Democrats talk about it), but I am pointing out that there are bad laws that hurt the black community a lot more than the white community.  Democrats like to talk about systemic racism even as they continue policies that were designed to hurt black people.  That’s more my point - you can admit that black people are hurt by certain laws more than white people, then point to laws that were designed to do just that and still do.  That’s where the systemic racism idea has a grain of truth - parts of our system were in fact designed to hurt blacks.  The Dems are just pointing to parts of our system that are the best way to raise people out of poverty and complaining about them, while pretending the very policies that hurt the people who loyally vote for them are somehow helping.  I think we should hammer that point hard, because it’s both true and damning to the Dems in this environment.  One doesn’t have to call for reparations to admit that Segregationist Democrats put policies in place to hurt the black community - it’s just not the policies the Dems today like to rant about.

Please provide an example or two.  Thanks

It’s pretty simple really... article is about physical attraction, but the psychology holds true across multiple aspects of life.  It’s not deliberate, but people tend to like people who are physically and/or culturally similar to them.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-mysteries-love/201505/are-we-attracted-people-who-look-us

What he ^ said.

SPOT ON!!

American "Black" Culture celebrates the dysfunctional & destructive, and wonders why they can't "get ahead"

I made it through the 1st 6 min before I was done.

It argues systemic racism is socioeconomic and is rooted in the lack of reparations, specifically citing 40 acres and a mule.

The 1st fallacy is that whites got rich off of blacks who were worth 3 billion in 1860.
Well, most whites didn't own slaves, first of all, and were poor farmers or factory workers. The plantation owners were a minority.
Secondly that 3 billion in wealth was wiped out overnight when the slaves were freed, yet white wealth bounced back.

Then they skip ahead to housing values between the 50s and today. Citing that as a mother example.

However, blacks weren't getting the benefits of property ownership?
Why?
Well, they didn't answer that.
Could it be that welfare and section 8 housing makes the need for home ownership moot, and therefore it isn't a goal?
Could it be that inner city culture creates crime that drives down property values and wages?

The only point they did have was 40acres and a mule being taken away.
It would have been an interesting experiment had it been done.

However, reparations is the only point, as it is always about money.
I would argue that if blacks were given the value of 40 acres and a mule in today's money, it would not be used to build generational wealth.

Why?
Because there isn't an emphasis in the black community at large, with investing in education and property.
Yeah, many would use it wisely. But many more would not.
In the meantime it would be an economic burden, add to national debt, and not fix the racial divide.

The law of unintended consequences is in action as well.    Look at the housing crash in 2008 - they pushed subprime loans to help poor people with bad credit buy homes.    Prices skyrocketed due to supply and demand and poor people wanting to buy homes got screwed.   Then the subprime people started defaulting because they really were poor credit risks and not only did they lose their homes, they lost every dollar they put into those homes.  

Minimum wage screws the poor the same way by driving up prices and making it harder to operate a small business.  The supply of low paying jobs shrinks leaving more people out of work.

You don't need racist intent to have negative effects that impact races differently.

There is no such thing as systematic racism. It’s a bullshit term made up to push Marxist goals.

Success in America is not hard:

1) Don’t have kids before marriage. Don’t have kids too young.
2) Don’t become a drug addict or alcoholic
3) get an education in something useful
4) work harder than those around you

You forgot
5) don't commit crimes and
6) don't fight with police

Whats the educational offset for earnings here? I’d venture the only thing holding blacks back is their own stigma. When we were kids and tried to blame our circumstances on some societal bullshit my mother would look us square in the eyes and say “ hmmm, sounds like an excuse...” that cured that bullshit with a quickness.

My mother got her master’s degree going to night school while working full time, pregnant with me and raising my two older siblings....in the 1960’s

I recently debated some people about this, I'm going to try to remember all the points that were brought up:

- Drug sentencing being unfair, e.g. harsher sentences for crack than for cocaine

- That basically anecdotal stories of negative interactions with the police or incidents of clear racism are so widespread that police and society are a lot more racist than we/white people tend to believe.

- That the black community is hurting/traumatized due to oppression and so higher drug use rates are the way they've coped with this(then leading to arrests/incarceration, and kids growing up without father's, etc.).

- That since police have power they are basically inherently corrupt, and citing racist policing from decades ago, and

- That crime data/statistics aren't trustworthy because it is collected by the police, therefore all those racist statistics we use, e.g.  black people committing like 50% of the murders, isn't true.

- That black people are falsely arrested/convicted/imprisoned at a high rate, or excessively charged.  But even if they did do it...

- That we basically can't hold the black community to our standards of law/behavior because they have been oppressed, communities damage by racist policies, being uprooted e.g. displaced for new highways and stuff, not being given home/business loans, etc. so they've been beaten down/oppressed more than Asians or Hispanics.

- That Asians who've come to America are more wealthy and that's why they have better stats than the black community.

- That white people oppressed Africa and that's why Africa is such a crappy place. Would have been basically on track to be just as advanced as Europe if the colonialism hadn't occurred.

- That all white people benefited from slavery indirectly, and that white people have benefited from laws/policies and generational wealth, while holding  down black people.

- That black people could not move around and have the same access to things, e.g. housing, that white people had.

- Oh, and black people can be "prejudiced," but not "racist," cause of power(we've all heard that new definition before).


I think that was basically everything.  I think that there is merit to to the fact that, yeah, our society had slaves in the past, yeah, up until the 60's a lot of white people were racist dicks, and policies and stuff did harm black people through that time, and in the decades since then. Absolutely.

But at the same time, that's not MY fault just because I'm white. That'd be like telling a black person to repent of drug use because other black people have used drugs. It's silly and racism.  Like, you don't get rid of racism by fomenting it against white people.  And as far as the solutions are concerned, if we conceded all the above points, ok, what are solutions? (Moreso, are there any non-racist solutions?)  

- Decades of welfare and cheap abortions have only made things worse and probably did so much more harm than if they'd never been instituted.
- Affirmative action is racist at it's core and means putting race over merit.  
- Providing all kinds of special programs and money for black people/communities, I guess Is fair in a grand-scheme sort of way, but still perpetuates racism(it's literally creating a system of racism to do this), and also brings up the problem of accountability and if this money is being well spent (or just going to politicians, DNC, etc.)
- Decriminalize drugs / reduced sentences. Eh, maybe. There's definitely cons to this.
- Get rid of prisons and police, hold black people to lower standards regarding rules/laws, give lighter sentences, etc.  Uhh, this seems like a terrible idea that will at best lead to a more revolving-door system, and at worst(like getting rid of police/prisons) would cause nothing short of anarchy. And again, if these policies are deliberately lenient based on race, then it becomes another racist institution.
- Oh I almost forgot, socialism/communism. Uproot our whole way of life, get rid of property rights so that everything anyone has can be stolen without recourse, and give extra money to black people, and put black people in positions of power based on race, err for Diversity.  The problems with this solution are of course, obvious.
- Edit: I'll add that someone else addressed the whole minimum wage thing and how increasing it only hurts black communities (and everyone).
- Oh and reparations, trillions in reparations on top of the welfare, on top of how those paying the reparations also pay a larger chunk of the tax revenue in general. In a cosmic way, sure reparations would be "fair," but in a very real way it's not fair at all and is racist to just take white people's money to give to another race, it reinforces a tit-for-tat/eye-for-an-eye mentality at a communal level, ergo revenge, it would wreak havoc economically(see Socialism), and it begs the question, hasn't every group been wronged by another? Do blacks owe whites reparations for excessive crimes? Do Germans owe the whole world? I mean this goes on and on, and doesn't it create NEW injustices to implement racist policies to right the wrongs of the past injustices?  It's becomes circular in the damage it does.

It sure does seem like a lot of the "solutions" to institutional systemic raciscm are...to institutionalize systemic racism.  Hmmm and the Left wonders why we balk at this.

The Great Society
Gun Control Act of ‘68

See above.

Why mock my post?

These guys get it.

The road to ruin is paved with good intentions.

I agree that certain laws disproportionately affect POOR people.  If black people are disproportionately impacted, it's because there are more poor/unskilled/uneducated black people, and that is a completely separate issue.  Those laws were meant by some to create a permanent underclass, and they did, but white or black doesn't matter.  If blacks are hurt more by them, it's not simply because they are black.  THAT is the message we should drive home.  The actual "cause" and "affect" are completely disconnected by your argument, and that is exactly what enables black people to blame white people, the laws, the police, and everything else but reality for their own failings.   You're going out of your way to create that "grain of truth", where it doesn't exist, and as long as people keep providing that excuse, they can never get past it.

Oh, I agree entirely - the consequences today are almost entirely unintended.  I’m simply trying to note that, in an environment where Democrats are pulling down statues of abolitionists because they weren’t woke enough, they’re ignoring real problems caused by real policies put forth by real segregationists while whining about things that truly help black communities and insisting on throwing more money at the problem without fixing underlying bad policies.

One can simultaneously hold, without any inconsistency, that the black community has serious issues that can’t be solved by government policies, and that there are government policies that make things worse.  In this case the government is doing far too much - policing stupid laws, making businesses harder to found, making jobs harder to get, making marriage less desirable, etc.  That doesn’t remove individual responsibility, but it does mean that the government is interfering with any community efforts to improve - and sponsoring government-paid leftist “community organizers” to propagate a victim mentality also doesn’t help.

Making the case to get the government out of the way, that part of the issues the black community faces are bad laws and paternalistic “help” that makes things worse, is a decent start on one part of a path forward.  Private charities and churches partnering with the community to help would be another vital part, as would work on their part.  But we need to make the case for all of it, focusing just on self-improvement without the other pieces will frustrate people, especially as they are told the only way out is government “help”.

Actually, I’m not going out of my way.  The history is very real - go look at the Congressional Record of the House on January 31, 1914, Representative Byrnes of South Carolina (page 2711) - (speaking of Asian and Southern European immigrants) “By reason of his habits he can underlive the American and therefore works for less, beating down the price of labor”. Or reference this article (skip the John Bolton stuff later in the article, the discussion of these issues is first).  The roots are there, just neglected, and the impact is real.  We can shout until we’re blue in the face that the black community needs to improve - and there are parts of that community that agree with you - but until we make the case that the government “help” is not helping, and that waiting for Uncle Sam to solve their woes will never pan out, it will be hard to convince a majority of this.  An active stance, arguing both that the problem is partially the government doing too much, and also private individuals, churches, and charities working to provide real help and training to work on the other issues, is the only real way forward.  As long as the system provides incentive for single-parent households, the barrier to starting businesses is too high, the ability to gain necessary skills made difficult, and the (false) lure of massive drug paydays held out as the main way to get out of poverty easily, it will be far harder to help the community improve.  We need to both change the perverse incentives and have church and charity provide help for real change - it’s not a simplistic “yell at them to do things differently” solution.

Yes, that is why liberalism or at least one of the reason liberalism is a disease. It is part of the liberal ' systemic logic to blame others for the failure of others.

"Systemic Racism" is among a handful of new concepts developed when activists realized their livelihoods were in danger of collapse due to the fact that there was almost no actual racism in our country.

Here are some of the other terms:

Microa gressions
White privilege
Triggering

Part of a complex web. of lies upon which the entire Leftist narrative is based.

@Puritanus  Thanks for your thoughtful, rational posts in this thread.  I don't agree with the general practice of lumping "poor" with "minority", but your posts are well thought out and a refreshing change from the usual low-effort snark of GD.  

If they’re working under minimum wage requirements they’re earning minimum wage, whether they’re working full time or not is a different question.

But there’s the supplemental drug income disparity between whites and blacks...it’s rarely talked about.

And how many families under earn or under report in the legitimate marketplace in order to keep their entitlements? Numbers have a way of not telling the entire truth. There’s now generations of families with history of gaming the system.

What about illegal immigration driving down the perceived value of minority (and legal immigrant) labor?

Bingo

I, in general, wouldn’t lump them together, but if someone wants to know the basis for saying “these policies started as racist” and “they still hurt black people more than whites”, the disparity comes up.  But the issues apply just as much to poor whites, and rich black people tend to live a lot like their white counterparts.

My understanding is that, for the vast majority of people, the supplemental drug income sucks.  The upper-eschelons make money, the lower people work out of the hope of making tons of money (like people play the lottery - hoping they’ll hit it big), but don’t make a lot.  And, I’ll note, the drug problem is huge in suburban and rural America these days.  You could just as easily talk about the “poor white” drug lords” - and I wouldn’t assume a massive disparity in that income without a good study on it (which is hard to do).

I don’t deny it at all.  It’s just not been something we brought up.  And from what I’ve seen, the major supporters of illegal immigration are the rich elites running things - there isn’t mass US support, even in the legal Latino community last I saw, for what’s going on.  But the elites sent to congress and the people bankrolling their re-election campaigns think it’s either “caring”, or are making bank off of it.  There’s a huge disparity worldwide between the (lack of) desire for more immigration on the part of the citizenry and what the elites demand, and get.

Again, I agree that laws or policies that hurt the poor people that they're intended to help should be abolished.  I reject the notion that a law or policy that when equally applied, disproportionately affects people of color is "racist", when the difference is due to their own behavior and culture.    Equality has to be equal.   Even if the original secret intend by some people was to keep black people down, it still has been applied equally, with disproportionate results.  If you label laws as being racist based on the end result, then you have to include laws against murder, armed robbery, etc.

There is no systemic racism in this country

The group of people that see racism in everything ARE the racists.

*sigh*

Again, I didn’t say the laws were racist.  I did say they were originally intended to be and still hurt black people more.  Doesn’t make them racist in my book - but when there’s an ongoing jihad against anything even slightly (or imaginatively) tinged by racism (ie a statue of Abraham Lincoln paid for by freed slaves and dedicated by Frederick Douglass), while we shouldn’t agree with the method, we have an opportunity to undercut the thing by forcing Democrat Elites to admit that one of these things is now anti-racist in their book, and then insisting things without that past or present are virulently racist.  The little bit of truth at the core of the lie of Systemic Racism is that laws in force today were passed by racists for racism and still impact minorities more.  The hand waving comes when you explain to Democrats that they support a lot of those laws today still.  They pull a bait and switch - laws that hurt minorities and were passed with explicit racist intent aren’t racist because the elites running things like the laws, but laws that have no racist background (and had bipartisan support until the day before yesterday) are virulently racist and must be destroyed.

If you fight the systemic racism idea by simply saying “the laws apply to everyone”, the Democrats will continue to pull out their disparate impact statements for laws they dislike, and insist you’re keeping minorities down.  You attack the core of their assertions by truthfully and forcefully showing their wrongness and convenient forgetting, you won’t stop the true believers (who will gladly say whatever the party line of the moment is), but you can try to turn public opinion.

This...Plus, reverse racism and reverse discrimination

What is at the core of the belief in systemic racism is the disparity between blacks and whites.  Allowing anyone to pretend it's the fault of some imaginary systemic racism in American laws and policies will only do one thing - increase the calls and justification for reparations, which is exactly what the left would love to have happen.  How would that work out in the fight against racism?

Then tell me what you propose.  I’ve laid out both the history and current status of laws that we want to have repealed and which are bad laws.  Laying that out doesn’t necessarily mean you leave the door open for imaginary concepts.  But if all we do is look at the current world, insist “nothing’s racist, everything’s fine, people are complaining over nothing, fix your community” we will be ignored by the people we want to reach - we’re preaching to the choir.  

In a debate, one of the more powerful tactics I’ve seen is to accept parts of your opponent’s argument and use them to make your own point.  Otherwise things tend to devolve into accusations that the other person is wrong, with no real progress.  The black community is in a terrible state.  We can speak the truth that they need to work on a lot of things while also saying things have been caused or compounded by government policy, not least of which because it’s true.  If we deny any need for policy change because the policies are race neutral, it’s easy for opponents to point and declare we’re simply ignoring the problems the black community is having.  If, on the other hand, we take time to lay things out and provide solutions people can understand, we may be able to change minds.  However, we’ve become so concerned about “heresy” in our ranks that any compromise is ignored.  Any opportunity for changing minds is eschewed in favor of pounding on talking points.  And how do you think that will end?

Who has a better chance at college and sitting on a board of directors for a fortune 500 company? A black female born in the inner city or a white male born in Appalachia? Who will get college and appointed a job with the least effort?

There is your real systemic racism.

Would applying to college and requesting scholarships and being denied because you are Asian count as systemic racism?  


Would being approved based on your race count as systemic racism?  

I have always said that the blacks keep the racism going.

The problem cannot be fixed by anyone accept the people in question.  Perpetuating their false belief that they are somehow being kept down, only prevents them from looking inward, and seeing the actual problem.  Your debate tactic of conceding points only works in a debate conducted in good faith.  The left does not act in good faith, and in this debate, the black population are viewed only as a means to an end.  

Again, I'm all for changing bad policy, but if a policy is bad for black people, it's just as bad for whites.  That's just the way it is.  I never said that nothing is racist.  I said that the disparity between races in this country is not caused by laws and policies, and pretending that it is, in any small part, will not go the way you think.  It just reaffirms what the left has them convinced of - that their problems are inflicted upon them, and that only a leg up from the government can fix them.  The way to change minds is with demonstrable truth, not tilting windmills in an attempt at appeasement.  If a law is bad, just change it, and everyone wins.  Being bad law is a good enough reason.  You don't have to declare it racist first, so that you can get awarded social justice points.  They are good for nothing.

I call it "picking the scab".

It is a sales ploy.  By using the term “systemic racism” they are implicitly selling the idea that the system is inherently racist, faulty, and must be changed.  The replacement system will prominently feature “struggle sessions” and starvation.

Yep

Fuck, I spelled "systemic" wrong

And how has stopping at “fix your own problems” worked?  And I’m not conceding systemic racism, but your desire to never discuss community problems outside of “you go fix it” misses the opportunity to make the exact case you want to - that bad policies are bad, and need to be fixed, but aren’t the fault of racists.  When you can concede that some of the community’s problems are exacerbated by bad policy implemented by people they are convinced aren’t racist, you have an opening to work to dismantle the heavily-ingrained idea that all their problems are caused by racist white people.  But when you start with simply insisting they fix their own community, the combination of people telling them it’s racism and the very real problems in their community that it sounds like you’re minimizing puts up heavy resistance because they assume you’re just a racist.  

The question becomes: Does the Republican Party care to work to gain minority votes, or is it more important to make the same point, over and over, in the vain hope that saying the same thing over decades will suddenly change things?  Stating “The Left doesn’t act in good faith” characterizes them as a monolith, which is the same idiocy they perpetrate against us.  Many very prominent leftists don’t argue in good faith.  That doesn’t mean all of them do, or that the same is true of everyone who votes Democrat.  People’s minds can be changed if you work to meet them where they are and understand their concerns.  Telling black people to fix themselves doesn’t acknowledge the reality that it is becoming much harder for the poor to enter the middle class, very many majority black schools are terrible, and that black people have a lot of crappy interactions with police.  In every one of those instances you can point to problems in the community.  You can also point to specific conservative policy remedies that are shown to help (cutting regulations on businesses and minimum wage laws, making it easier to dissolve public schools when parents determine they’ve failed and allowing parents to take a voucher equal to state spending per student in a year and select any school they want to use it at, and finally getting rid of BS nanny state laws and attacking the “policing for profit” many communities have implemented instead of having police focus on actually tackling crime).  They won’t immediately accept those remedies, but you can get an opening to make a case.

Ignoring real problems to avoid any hint of a statement that might possibly reenforce their preexistent biases assumes the biases aren’t already heavily entrenched, and assumes trying to acknowledge problems on the part of one community is both always “social justice” pandering and ignores the problems the laws cause for other people.  I’ve been pretty clear about my purpose, and it isn’t to win SJW points.  But turning any sympathy for black people and acknowledgement of things that hurt their community into “Social Justice” points simply assumes the black community will never understand a point more complicated than “Heal Yourself”, and simply concedes they’ll always be leftist.  I’d rather we actually work against the leftists rather than assuming groups of people are forever in their thrall.

ETA: And on the “conflating black people and poor people” thing, it’s one of those things that’s hard to do justice too, even in a book of a post like this.  Black households on average are much poorer than Asian, White, or Hispanic households, statistical fact.  Because of that a lot of proposals to help “the black community” will include proposals to help the poor and lower classes because many of them are.  And, apart from some of the Police interaction stuff people like Senator Tim Scott and others have discussed, what help do upper-middle and upper class black people really need?  They, not poor blacks from crappy public schools, are the ones benefiting from quotas at major universities.  They are the ones benefiting from business diversity quotas and black-only scholarships and business support.  That the policies can help the white and black poor is the whole point, but unless you address people’s concerns for their community directly, they may not listen.

You have mischaracterized everything that I have said.   When I said that only they could fix their problems, I meant that only they can stop making bad decisions, and take advantage of the opportunities that are right there before them.  Stop having babies with no fathers in the household, stop dropping out of school, stop living a life of crime, and believing that the police are their enemies.  Go to college.  Get a job.  No one can do these things for them, and they are the root of their problems.  Everyone knows it, yet EVERYONE on the left tries to convince them otherwise.  It's a lie, and conceding any part of it is also a lie.

I have never said to ignore the very real problems that affect the black community.    I said that those same laws and policies that you're pointing out, adversely affect all races equally, so yes, PLEASE fix them.   All of the problems that you have mentioned can be fixed without "admitting" that they are caused by racism.  They are not, and accepting that they are would exacerbate the problem of them believing that they are victims of systemic racism.  Absolutely, fix the problems, for everyone.  You are apparently under the impression that the only way we can, is if we label them as racist first.   You can't stop people from being professional victims by convincing them that the ARE victims, when they most certainly are not.

As for changing the minds of those on the left, you falsely assume that they don't already know the truth, and that they actually want the problems to be fixed.  This is where they do not act in good faith.  They know exactly what the problems are, because they created them and actively work to perpetuate them.  That's exactly what "racism" is all about.  If you want to win minority votes, just shut up about racism, and make everyone's lives better.  

Those policies help anyone that takes advantage of them.  Poor has nothing to do with it.  *Edit to clerify, being poor doesn't prevent anyone from taking advantage of opportunity.  I left home with nothing when I was 17 years old, and I figured it out.*  There isn't a black person in this country that can't go to college if they want to, probably for free.  Yet a disproportionately small number choose to do so.  You have a culture in which leaving your community to go to college makes you a sell-out, and an outsider.  How are you going to fix that?  How is that the fault of any existing policy, and what new policy can fix it?  This is the very nature of the problem, and exactly my point.


ETA: And on the “conflating black people and poor people” thing, just because something disproportionately  impacts black people, it doesn't mean that it's racist.

A few points:
No, I’m not saying tell them policies are racist.  I’m trying to start by showing them policies that, incontrovertibly, were enacted by racists, and that those policies are hurting their community but supported by them and their representatives.  It’s a way of showing them that past intent doesn’t change current reality, acknowledging real wrongs in the past, and attempting to show a path forward, while also addressing the constant charges of racism.  You can help get people’s attention by acknowledging their concerns, and attempt to show them that while you understand them, the group of policies they label as Anti-Racist will not and have not helped black people on the whole, that labeling things with no racist intent as racist doesn’t help, and that policies with majority support in their community were in fact originally racist, undermining the current idea that anything associated with racism is forever tainted.  You don’t like that, but your approach seems to be “do the same things we have but harder”

And yes, they need to fix the single parent spiral in their communities, and the leftist elite are double-faced hypocrites, marrying and living like it’s 1955, while espousing policies they and their children don’t follow and won’t follow.  So does the increasingly large poor white community.  We won’t get the message out by just saying “go fix it”.  “Everyone” knows that there’s “nothing” wrong with having ten children by the same number of dads, that marriage is an antiquated construct, and other crap.  We have to take the long road to rebuild the middle class, as long and arduous as the first time it was built, and start by working to convince people of the lies they have been told, which requires a lot of private effort and work.  

And you seem to object to specifically saying things will help “the black community”.  While I don’t like pandering, addressing people’s concerns and how your policy prescriptions can help them isn’t that.  You need to know your audience - which means if a Republican goes to the black inner city (something they should do more often) they should address different things than if they were addressing black professionals (something they should also do more often).  But if we’re going to specifically address black unemployment, lower average wages, interactions with the police, and the like, the major topics currently lumped under “systemic racism”, you will need to address them specifically.  Stating a policy will help the black community overall (or, more precisely, the more than majority of them who are much poorer than the average American) isn’t wrong.  Throwing handouts and pork at people is one thing, applying policies to their concerns is another.

Finally, you are flat out wrong about liberals and the left.  I will not deny there are people who don’t believe in their policy prescriptions and just go along to stay in power.  There are plenty like that in the Republican Party too.  But the large majority on the left fall into two camps: they believe in the policies and heartily endorse them, or they grew up Democrat, haven’t looked hard at it, like the little they hear, and keep voting that way.  People can be highly intelligent, well informed, and dead wrong.  It’s not even unusual - everyone has areas where they are simply wrong, even if they think they know things well.  Doesn’t make them a cabal trying to maintain power by lying, just means they’re wrong.  Assuming the worst of your opponents is the same thing they do about us - and the more opposing sides paint each other this way, the worse things get. And people not knowing much about politics isn’t a knock on them either - the time and effort it can take to keep up takes away from other things they care about more, and in all honesty one voter being more informed won’t make a whit of difference in almost any election.  En masse, it’s dangerous, which is why I don’t go that route, but if you watch the country for the last few decades, I can understand cynicism.

Republicans aren’t immune to the same things - how many Republicans actually know what they support in the party platform, what politicians have actually done, and keep up with political news?  Only the hard core political aficionados.  And we have our share of the cynically conniving as well.

If we decide to never try to bridge the gap and just try to steamroll our opponents, the American Experiment is headed for a huge collision.  It’s not inevitable, and it’s not all the Left’s fault.  There’s plenty of blame to go around.

That is not the only reason.  You have a culture in which some in a community consider college makes you a sell-out.  Same thing happens in large swaths of the poor white community too.  You also have people who have been terribly educated and told their entire lives they aren’t capable of going further, or who think they are the problem rather than the educator despite working to improve, or who simply don’t know anyone in college and assume they can’t make it.  The same goes for a lot of poor whites.  Does there need to be a culture change?  Absolutely.  But there is more that can be done, both to fix absolutely crap schools, to remove government barriers that help convince people their business can’t succeed, and, privately, to come along side the community and help encourage people towards more solid behaviors.  The government can’t do it all.  Private charity can’t solve it all.  The community on its own will have a huge uphill climb to solve it all, and headwinds of current policies making things worse.  But saying “anyone can go to college if they want it hard enough” is a bit of a self-fulfilling myth.  Anyone who doesn’t get to college is automatically assumed to have not wanted it enough - regardless of any other reasons that got in the way.  Go read “Hillbilly Elegy” - J D Vance got out of the downward spiral he was born in by the grace of God and naught else.  He didn’t “want” it more, he had the right people in his life to help him along and show him it was a thing he could and should want, and to slap him around if he went the wrong way.  If functional communities can’t lend a hand, if barriers that enforce current beliefs aren’t removed, things will continue.