On average, black Americans are affected by poverty and criminality to a much greater degree than white Americans, and this has been attributed to a bugaboo called systemic racism. Slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining have all been named as the usual suspects whose ongoing effects are part and parcel of this systemic racism; occasionally thrown into the mix is the fact that the original “G.I. Bill” passed after the Second World War failed to benefit black Americans as it did white Americans at the time. So systemic racism is the reason for black poverty, it is claimed, and poverty is … Continue reading →