I think there's a lot of messaging to African Americans telling them there's no opportunity or hope, meaning why try. Endless messaging about racism to the point that even if 95% of Americans would chew their own arm off rather than be called racist, the expectation of young Black people is that "White" America is against them. That harms your motivation. Frankly, spending the best years of your life working to make someone else rich from 8am to 6pm, for a modest wage with a few weeks off a year *is* pretty depressing when you think about it - which is why most of us have just stopped thinking about it. You can claw your way up but it's hard. It usually takes two generations of real effort to get from poor to Middle Class, sometimes three. High levels of incarceration of fathers in African American communities further break the necessary generational chain to improve your place in society. If your parent(s) have a job and work at it then you've got a kind of underlying expectation upon you to do the same and most people follow society's expectations for better or worse. But young African Americans, I think, too often begin life with no such expectations to up to; being told before they even start that the rest of society will look down on them because of the eternal obsession with racism US media has. And so they have to find the motivation to really change their life fundamentally whereas most people just need the regular momentum to carry on following their parents and society's expectations.
So it's no surprise that immigrants from Africa tend to thrive much better on average - they've already taken a huge step in making their life better and the obstacles to success in America aren't the ones they're used to: lack of stability, endemic low-level corruption and civil unrest. They're psychological and cultural ones that they were never exposed to growing up. Vice (of all media hard to believe it's them) have an interview up where African American Conservatives debate African American Liberals. It's a great watch. I don't think anyone needs to invoke ideas of genetic superiority - culture and upbringing are more than sufficient to explain differences in societal success. I've full respect for anyone who manages to claw their way up from poverty and make something of themselves. I'm not Left-Wing or Progressive, in fact I'm pretty Right Wing and fiercely meritocratic. But it's not hard to see that many African Americans start life with a lot stacked against them. And it's silly to pretend it isn't hard to turn your life around, else everyone would do it!
Black people in America, as a group, need stability and time to find their feet as a culture. They were doing pretty damn well after slavery ended and up until Democrat policies encouraged family breakups, the CIA started flooding inner cities with crack and now our media blaring out 24/7 "race!race!race!".
