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Interesting article, but I don't think that black people's feeling of inferiority and helplessness was a product of slavery. I grew up in the 1950's and my black friends - even though Jim Crow laws still existed - certainly did not feel inferior, and those who lived in places where there was no institutionalized racism felt that they were going to go places and do things.

The "Great Society" essentially put an end to this. Blacks could no longer be individuals, some of whom would do well and some of whom would not, but had to be a group, defined by the government as helpless, needy and an object of constant care and concern. It may have been well meant, but it was poison nonetheless.

Being regarded as nothing but one more member of a dysfunctional, needy client group is enough to undermine anyone's resolve. The remarkable thing is that some individual blacks have done as well as they have.

Having "non-authentic" black friends who are reasonably conservative and hardly anti-white, and having talked to quite a few black co-workers over the years, I think that while some black people do overestimate the amount of white racism, I think that white people tend to underestimate it because they just don't see it. And I do honestly think that white people also underestimate the effect that slavery had on blacks by cutting them free from a cultural identity. A lot of urban black culture is really the residual culture of slavery and of being part of the underclass in the South after emancipation. But it's their cultural identity, and they cling to it because they think they have nothing else to turn to and think that adopting mainstream American cutlure is selling out. It's really no different than the Welsh or Scots who resented adopting English culture and so on. In many ways, it's a form of cultural patriotism. But the problem, in this case, is that the culture they are keeping isn't the culture of their distant ancestors but a culture of poverty and the underclass. Blacks need to feel that they have a stake in mainstream American culture and need to stop feeling that becomming mainstream is "selling out". While that does happen, it needs to happen on a much larger scale to see real social change.