What weird suggestions you make for dealing with our history of racially motivated crimes against non-white people. I’ve got a couple of my own. We are the richest nation in history, we can easily guarantee that every public school is an excellent school. Might cost us 100 F-35 fighters and a carrier or two but think of the utter waste of tens of millions of poorly educated kids who grow up not to contribute to our country but rather to require the expensive social interventions of the Law Enforcement Complex and social services for their broken families? No doubt you are familiar with the concept of opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of telling a significant slice of the American population that their lives aren’t valued enough to warrant the kind of schools and community investment that are routine and expected in other social classes? Do you think that message doesn’t come through loud and clear?

Those broken inner cities and suburban poverty zones, blacks were shunted into them by both law and business practices. Of course now that business (big pharma) has infected poor white communities with a deadly drug plague we are willing to try to treat that plague aggressively, the way we never bothered to when it was restricted to black communities, other than to fill our jails with black entrepreneurs and addicts.

Maybe I wouldn’t have succeeded in the opportunities I had if I had brought less to the table, the skills and attitudes I brought came directly from the great public schools I was fortunate to attend, from a family that was entering its third generation of college attendance and degrees. And of course I wouldn’t have gotten through the door if my face was black. I’m an outlier, but we can’t as a society sit back on our laurels because outliers can succeed, we desperately need all people to succeed, and we have both the knowledge and the resources to make that happen to a large degree, if only we gave a damn. So far we seem to be more willing to pay the social and financial costs of failed individuals, failed communities than we are to apply common sense fixes like desegregated and excellent schools, treatment for diseases of despair that increasingly afflict our poor white communities like addiction and poor health habits.