And their present calamitous situation is not a matter of black color, African origins, slave culture, or the risks of exobiology. It's something else.
How about a special legislative committee to study the “continuing effects of a culture of perpetual grievance, loss of father-headed families, and degrading welfare dependency” on African-Americans?
At the time of the Harlem Renaissance --- a wonderful outpouring of creativity in poetry, drama, dance, music, philosophy, literature, political and religious thought in the 1920's and 1930's --- 90% of the Black children in Harlem were living in households headed by their own married fathers and mothers.
Something catastrophically destructive happened to the Black community, not just before 1865, or between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, but between the 1930's and now. It wasn't some kind of exotic-afro-alienism. And it wasn't slavery.
Think, think.
One of the things that happened was the Great Society. Many blacks in NYC were fairly poor, but they were in the position of any immigrant group, in the sense that most of them actually were immigrants from the South and were trying to make their way into a different, more economically advantageous culture.
The black crime rate was always higher, but it was not the sort of blatant, callous crime that it reflects now. However, it wasn’t impossible for whites, whether Anglo or Hispanic, native-born or immigrant, to live in a black area because there was a large black working class who wanted the same things for their kids as everybody else.
When I was a child (1950s), the projects in Harlem were mixed, and families could only get in if the parents of the children were married and if one of them had a job. Then suddenly in the mid-60s, they dropped both of those requirements (and also started permitting unmarried mothers), and within no time at all the projects were all black and had become seething hotbeds of crime and destruction.
Decent black people did not like this at all, btw. I was a waitress when I was in college and one of my fellow waitresses was a black woman in her 40s or so who had several children (and a husband, of course) and lived in the projects. She was furious and said this was going to give all the wrong messages to black children. And sure enough, it did, even to her kids: a year later, her 16 year old daughter was pregnant and applying for her “own” apartment in the projects. She felt she had failed and she was very, very upset - but it was the times, and it was the message coming out in a very powerful way, with financial incentives, from the federal government, the city government and all of the media.