As the grandfather of five African American grandchildren, I have a personal interest in African American children realizing their full potential. As an American, I think our nation needs to help children realize their potential if we going to thrive as a nation.

My point was simple, the past is gone. Slavery was horrible, Jim Crow laws were deplorable. Okay, with that out of the way, let's look at pragmatic reality, since reviewing the history of slavery and Jim Crow laws is not going to change or help a single poor child regardless of race realize their potential.

Remember only 16% of all children, not just black children escape poverty permanently... if that is the case, then past slavery is not the problem... it may explain why how some black families got to where they are, but there are so many black families that have succeeded, there has to be something much more fundamental that explains why poor children can't escape poverty as adults, no matter their skin color.

And only when we move off the constant discussion of race, do we have even a slight chance of helping poor children including poor black children.

As someone who ran multiple companies, I could never get enough good black, Asian, Hispanic, or white employees, whether they were male or female, transgender or gay. One company I ran had 42,000 employees and we hired up 7,000 employees annually and frankly, we didn't care if you were purple or green (though I don't think we hired anyone that was purple or green, some purple and others green hair.

So, do you see the disconnect? With companies desperately seeking qualified people of any color to fill good paying jobs (the company I ran was a health care company), it is not race, but the failure of our society to deliver poor children from poverty to an employer's door with the skills to earn a good living for themselves and their future families. Digging deep and looking past skin color is far more important than getting stuck at "skin color". Understanding what the specific things that prevent poor children of any color getting the life skills and education they need is critical if we are going to make a difference.

As mentioned, my brother proved that a Charter school comprised of 75% of children whose families live below the poverty line can produce a senior high school class where 100% of the children graduate and 94% of the children get accepted to college. Implicit bias and all the other concerns you raise are simply not that relevant compared to figuring out how to get 100% of poor children to graduate high school with an education that qualifies them to go to college.

Now here is another statistic you need to understand. If you go to the PayScale compensation studies (the most comprehensive study I have ever seen with more than 500,000 people in their database), Employers are not discriminating against minorities with respect to pay... in fact Asian women earn around 1% more than white men and black men earn around 1% less. That simply does not sound like racism to me.

If you look at studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will find that blacks with college educations have lower unemployment rates (though almost statistically not significant) than whites. The whole difference in unemployment rates between blacks and whites is explained by education. So, skin color does not translate into hiring differences or pay differences at the societal level.

To be clear, I have no doubt that some individuals are racists and exercise their racist attitudes at work and in society in general. And so, every person (I was mugged as a child because of the color of my skin) has experienced racism, but the country is a huge place and people move on and successful companies seek the best talent they can get.

We agree poverty is a predictor that a child will not succeed, but not a cause. If you are correct and I think you partially are, that our public education system is failing them, then let's fix it... my brother's charter school operates on 85% of the budget per child that the community public school does... so let's admit money is not the problem, since his children perform on national tests at suburban school levels. So, let's do a deep dive into why so many poor communities' public schools are failing to deliver the education they are supposed to be delivering (I am not against public schools, my children all went to them... the issue is very narrow... inner city public schools are failing).

I actually don't think for the most part it is the teachers as much as the parents. Seems harsh to say that, but the truth is when parents care about their child's education, the success of those children soars as again my brother's charter school proves... the children that attend his school come from the same poor community as the children attending the failing community public school... the big difference is the children in his school were chosen randomly from among those children whose parents cared enough to put their child into the lottery.

I had a similar experience in Massachusetts, where poor children from Boston could be put into a lottery to be bussed to may town's public school. For the most part, those children did amazingly better, than their peers left behind in the inner-city public schools. I don't think there was any difference in the health care available to the children in my brother's charter school or the inner-city children being bussed to my community's public schools in the suburbs of Boston. The real difference was getting children whose parents wanted their children to get a good education to a place they could get a good education... again skin color was not a factor in all cases, children were selected at random, and the results were pretty spectacular.

All of this keeps bringing you back to the same problem. It is not the implicit bias of society that poor children even poor black children are struggling with to succeed as much as it is other factors that make delivering a useful education difficult in poor communities... nearly all those factors are cultural issues within the families of these poor children individually and collectively.

Until we move past skin color and focus on what cultural factors are contributing to our society's failure to reach poor children, we won't make any progress, since skin color is not the reason holding poor children back, since poor white children have similar experiences.

That reality takes nothing away from the fact, that in the past, skin color was a big issue holding blacks back. But the past is not the present and we must move on and deal with the present.

Interestingly, once you address education, family situation, culture, and other non-skin color factors that contribute to success, there is not much left to attribute to skin color suggesting more skin color comparisons are correlations not causation. This is great news for me, the grandfather of five African American children... since I can't influence their skin color, but I can influence all the other factors that are the real determinators of success.