I tend to meet a lot of white people who chalk up the misfortune of black people to personal responsibility, especially in the South. I also meet some successful black people who do the same.

I don’t always agree with them and tend to believe there’s more to the situation.

I don’t meet a lot of black 1 percenters, although they do exist. I think if you remove Ghanaians and Nigerians from the statistics, the worsening conditions of Black Americans in the USA only become magnified.

As an engineer, I’ve always tended to believe that environmental variables dictate large scale performance of any group of humans.

Example 1:

People: Spaniards are lazy.

Me: Spaniards are in the worst time zone given their placement and have been so for almost a century. It has blowback effects on productivity. Think joules/capita vs labor hours.

Example 2:

People: Americans are fat and lazy.

Me: Give me a 100K europeans, and I’ll make them fatter by bringing them to the USA. Food environments matter.

Similarly, I think there are environmental variables at play that have basically put black people in a bind in the USA and the evidence overwhelmingly seems to support this.

Together, I believe the following 3 things create a symbiotic death spiral effect for the black community in the USA.

1. Asymmetrical property rights access

Redlining and Blockbusting didn’t end til the early 1980’s. Even once that ended, this didn’t end predatory lending schemes that other minorities were less subject to. (Indians and Chinese crowdsourced loans and used family labor, hispanics sent money back to buy land in prior locales, etc…..). While other races accrued generational wealth, blacks in the USA accrued a generational debt death spiral.