This is a response to: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100831053051AAGCYn2

Blacks are more poor than whites because there was 400 years of slavery. During that time, some white people got really rich on the backs of Black people. That's just an economic fact.

Today, these descendents of these rich white (aka Old Money) argue for "trickle down economics". Yes, that wealth trickles down, but guess to whom? Just a select elite of rich people, most of whom are white guys. There are some minorities in there, but they don't live in the ghettoes.

Also, "ghetto" started out referring to the way Jews were kept in segregated cities. That's why we call some areas in America ghettos today - Black people were forced to live in specific areas. They didn't have freedom of movement. This was the reality until the 1960s, and a little bit into the 1980s too!

In South Africa apartheid didn't end until the late 1980s, so there you go. Just kind of like America.

So why are they poor? Well, why are Asian Americans, who came over around 1850 to 1920, less wealthy than whites who came over during that same time? Why are we seeing so many early 20th century white immigrants' descendents doing better than the descendents of Asians from that time frame. Racism. Discrimination in work. Lack of opportunity to buy real estate. Get rid of these unfair things, and people flourish.

As far as drugs go - who grows the drugs? Who manufactures the drugs? It's an international trade, and it's not Blacks or Browns, for the most part, at least not the ones in the USA. If you ever get into the drug culture, you find that it's very multicultural, it's mostly white, and more college educated that most wholesale and retail operations. The African Americans get blamed mainly because the open street-level trade happens in their neighborhoods, or black gangs set up shop in some poor neighborhood.

This is like blaming Asian Indians and Korean Americans for owning liquor stores and selling alcohol. It's not like these merchants produced the product, which is made by international corporations like InBev and Seagrams. The corporations advertise heavily to poor people, and the merchants sell what's in demand. What can they do? But I digress.

I'm not saying African American's can't do their part to stop the negative effects of drugs. They certainly can, but it's folly to think they can fix the entire problem, when it's not their poor and working class communities that are creating the problem!

If liquor store owners and drug dealing gangsters could make money selling organic vegetables to the people, I'm sure they'd be doing that instead. It's a lot safer. But a lot of middle class people want cocaine, marijuana, meth, and heroin. The real problem is the middle class. The middle class and rich have options, and they are opting to maintain ghettos (which they own, btw), to do their drugs, and to really destroy the lives of a lot of people. Blame the right people.