A most unkind thing to do is to take someone’s arguments seriously and then ponder what could be done to solve the problem being described. The Black Lives Matter movement says the United States is a structurally racist and divided society and that we ought to do something to remedy this situation. OK. Let’s do that.

Take the wealth gap, for example. It’s entirely true that black people have lower average household wealth than do white people. Accidents of birth for both of us and John Rawls’s veil of ignorance insist that we do something about this. Great. Let’s abolish rental housing subsidies. If this generation lives in subsidized rental housing, the next won’t inherit housing equity. For all but the top 10% of our society, housing equity is by far the largest portion of familial wealth. This actually explains a large part of the wealth gap. Yes, there were redlining and horrendous mortgage contracts forced upon black would-be homeowners. But it is also true that we’ve been subsidizing rentals and keeping black people from gaining housing equity for the past 60 years or so. Stop doing that, and in a generation’s time, the situation will be improved.