“So I guess you have a point. Now what can we do about it?”

The “what can we do about it?” part is very difficult in today’s political climate, obviously, when any “acceptable” explanation for black underachievement has to involve discrimination and racism, and no other ideas are so much as willing to be entertained by the organs of the establishment. If we can’t even name the problem, how can we possibly combat it, right?

In my view, the main solution for African-Americans is and always has been the same as the solution for all previous generations of those who started with little or nothing (usually as penniless, uneducated immigrants), lived in inhuman conditions in ethnic ghettos, faced discrimination that questioned their intellectual capacities as a group and then, despite all those obstacles, worked their way up until they got fully integrated on all levels. Integration is the key. When you have blacks and whites living in the same places, in the same ways and interacting on equal terms as part of each other’s workplaces, neighborhoods, families and places of worship, then you’re not going to have a distinct, toxic African-American cool-pose culture dragging American blacks back down to the socioeconomic bottom. But it’s hard to get to that point when so much of the mindset now is essentially identitarian and segregationist.