Here’s a useful exercise: take the roughly 250-year history of the U.S. and divide it into periods of, say, 20 or 30 years each. For each of those periods, make entries into these columns for your own best understanding of the ‘black community’, generally en mass or as notable individuals:

• Activities/situations that they were forced into by threats, manipulation, economics, or assurances/promises

• Who enforced, created, and directly benefited from the above, and how

• Actions taken by blacks to overcome, escape, rise above, become self-responsibile, self-reliant, or get a voice/‘place at the table’

• The direct response to those actions and how they were administered

Yes, it’s a field of study polluted with wokeness and SJW terms, but there’s plenty of true facts easily available for you to find. Then reconsider your ‘all-or-nothing’ dichotomy about personal responsibility in terms of actual history (not the woke narratives fed to students today) in light of some clear patterns you’ll uncover.

If that’s too much work, you might also try this approach:

Look into who does the most to spread the ‘blame everyone else’ message into the black community today, and then identify those among the black community who have countered that message most loudly. What happened to them almost immediately after, and what parties had the power to make it happen? Why wouldn’t those parties want that message to spread?

Here’s a useful exercise: take the roughly 250-year history of the U.S. and divide it into periods of, say, 20 or 30 years each. For each of those periods, make entries into these columns for your own best understanding of the ‘black community’, generally en mass or as notable individuals:

• Activities/situations that they were forced into by threats, manipulation, economics, or assurances/promises

• Who enforced, created, and directly benefited from the above, and how

• Actions taken by blacks to overcome, escape, rise above, become self-responsibile, self-reliant, or get a voice/‘place at the table’

• The direct response to those actions and how they were administered

Yes, it’s a field of study polluted with wokeness and SJW terms, but there’s plenty of true facts easily available for you to find. Then reconsider your ‘all-or-nothing’ dichotomy about personal responsibility in terms of actual history (not the woke narratives fed to students today) in light of some clear patterns you’ll uncover.