In the land of opportunity, those who consistently fall behind are immediately suspect. So it is with African-Americans. Suspicion is especially widespread in the 1990s because, unlike a generation ago, today most white Americans are convinced that blacks have been given every chance to succeed, and have even been pushed ahead of whites by affirmative action and government subsidies. Despite this help, they seem to fail at the economic game. Is it not logical that there is something wrong with them, not the system?

The image of failure is not just assigned to poor urban blacks. Many whites feel that the children of black working- and middle-class families are also not doing as well in school as whites, are dropping out of college with much greater frequency than whites, and are not working as hard or keeping to the same family values as other ethnic groups. The implicit message is that there is something about African-Americans' values and motivations that keeps them from taking advantage of educational and economic opportunities. Were those values to change, so would black fortunes.

This is an appealing image for whites and for many successful blacks. It fits with the standard evaluation of their own individual success stories, and it corresponds to a more recent, frequently invoked “model minority” – Asian-Americans.