Just a few questions, Roger:

We should ask first where, ideally, we would like to end up. A realistic goal would be for being black to be roughly analogous to being Irish.

Well, your optimism is certainly in a fine old tradition, and is conservative to that degree. We are all fond of tradition. Most of the bearers of that particular tradition, however, have been left-liberal. There was, for example, Arnold Rose, co-author with left-wing Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in the tremendously influential 1944 book An American Dilemma. In 1962 Rose offered the opinion that black-white friction would be inconsequential — “in the minor order of Catholic-Protestant prejudice” — by 1992. A few years earlier, arguing for the plaintiffs in Brown (1954), Thurgood Marshall told us that it would take five years to attain full school integration nationwide. For a view of how that worked out, see this book by another liberal.

You then ask:

How do we fall short of this ideal, and what can we do to reach it? In terms of legal distinctions in treatment, we are already there (with the important exception of racial preferences — a.k.a. affirmative action — discussed later). The government is not allowed to treat people differently on the basis of skin color, and it is illegal to do so in most publicly transacted private matters as well (employment, etc.)

I don’t agree that affirmative action is the only obstacle to our being “already there.” The great and pestilential industry of “discrimination” lawsuits (which I once explored on NRO here) is surely another. It not only degrades our business competitiveness by imposing unnecessary costs on our firms, it breeds cynicism and further division. All discrimination laws should be struck down. They are just affirmative action imposed by threat upon the private sector.

there are still individuals who harbor racial bias and who, therefore, engage in racial discrimination.

You make it sound as if this is just a residual problem of a few knuckle-dragging ignoramuses refusing, no doubt with malign intent, to get with the program. The cognitive science, however (see here, here, herefor example) suggests that there is nothing more ineradicably human than “harboring racial bias.” Patterns of residential and educational segregation (see Jonathan Kozol’s book for the latter; for the former, circumspice) suggest widespread racial discrimination by some very large majority of Americans. That would include liberals, of course — see item 03 here, for example.

The reason for bigotry today is … that the bigots observe the disproportionate number of African Americans who are poor or jobless or in prison or whatever, and conclude that there is something wrong with the whole race.

That seems incoherent, unless I’m missing something. How can the reason for bigotry be something that bigots do, except tautologically? (“The reason for alcoholism is that alcoholics drink too much …”)

It is illegitimacy that results in the bunching of black people in poverty and unemployment and prison.

Er …

Fix that problem, and there won’t be much left to improving race relations.

The problem got its first real public airing 44 years ago. The black illegitimacy rate back then was 22 percent. It is currently 70 percent; and the overall national rate for all races was 37 percent in 2005, vs. less than eight percent in 1965. Lots of questions occur. For example: If Moynihan thought 22 percent for black Americans was a problem, why isn’t 37 percent for all Americans a 68 percent bigger problem for everybody? And: If 44 years of public anxiety about the issue got us from 22 percent to 70 percent, how long do you estimate it will take to “fix that problem”? And … how do we fix it?

The president has already encouraged African Americans to follow the Obamas’ lead when it comes to family and child-rearing.

Oh, right, Obama will fix it by example! But questions multiply: Will this come after he’s halted the rise in sea levels, or before? And: Wasn’t Bill Cosby supposed to have done the fix-by-example thing already? Have African Americans really been so short of examples of stable families this past 44 years? Etc., etc.

But I’m sure you’re right. Obama will fix it. He’s going to fix everything!