My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are

My mother is a child psychologist who works primarily with victims of crime and, overwhelmingly, African-Americans. She's come to the conclusion that there are specific parenting faults that you find in the African-American population that you don't find in other similarly-impoverished populations and she believes that they're a legacy of slavery. Parenting abilities/tendencies/techniques are all passed down through the generations. We, as humans, learn our parenting by being parented. But, too often during slavery, this chain was broken. Children were ripped away from their parents and that accumulation of parenting practice was lost. Since involved parents are the single biggest determining factor in educational outcomes and education is the surest way out of poverty, this legacy of slavery rings the most true to me as the explanation for why African-Americans find it so much harder to break out of the cycle of poverty than other minority groups. Perhaps the best group to compare with are more recent immigrants from Africa. I have a number of friends who's parents came to the US from Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. They had very little when they arrived here and have the same skin color which is purported to be such a disadvantage to the African-American​ population. And while they've universally told me that they have experienced discrimination and prejudice, they've also not had much difficulty lifting themselves out of poverty by the second generation.