I want to co-sign Ta-Nehisi Coates' approval of Melissa Harris-Perry properly contextualizing the history of the wealth gap between whites and nonwhites while subbing for Rachel Maddow:
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I would have gone farther than Harris-Perry, though. During the so-called age of liberal consensus, the massive engine of the federal government was devoted to creating an American middle class, but that was only possible because of the Faustian bargain made between Southern segregationists and liberals to ensure that black people were cut off from the opportunities being created. One of the most powerful and devastating historical myths is that the economic and social asymmetry that resulted had nothing to do with government and everything to do with one group of people being culturally inferior to the group that supposedly pulled itself up by its bootstraps. That myth is key to rationalizing the idea that government lacks the capability to address the problem, and that success is wholly attributable to Galtian willpower or the lack thereof.
