I have family who recently immigrated from Liberia, and their general sense is that the black slave descendants had their family structures so incredibly destroyed that it makes sense to focus on those descendants instead of all Black people.
In their communities with strong family networks and more fathers in the home, they don't see nearly the same issues as the mostly fatherless slave descendent families.
It's my understanding that this one is less about the legacy of slavery per se, and more just a feature of poverty.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...
But one wouldn't reasonably expect that to continue, no? The critics who say "slavery was a long time ago" have a point on this one. Humans getting married is very normal - if you disrupt that for a generation or two, you'd still expect it to resume. We are many generations past slavery.
I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way.
Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more.
I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found.
Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.