He describes them mostly in present-tense terms, and my reading of the point about slavery is that it's a past problem with effects persisting into the present.

He describes them mostly in present-tense terms, and my reading of the point about slavery is that it's a past problem with effects persisting into the present. And FWIW I wouldn't say that they have mostly been fixed now. It's true that racism's got a lot better, but the US is still very individualistic (for good and/or ill), there are still big racial differences in prosperity (whatever the causes), and the US still puts an awful lot of people in prison.