Liberals have a tendency to focus on legal frameworks and equality before the law while ignoring the material conditions and the lived experiences of black people.

In some sense, it's trivially true that legal equality means things are "better", but there's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that material gains won by the civil rights movement have regressed significantly.

For example, in many places, schools are more segregated than they've been since the 60s [1]. Further, the housing crisis erased gains in black wealth back to levels of the 80s and 90s [2].

This is too large a subject to get into in an HN comment, but if you're curious, I'd highly suggest reading Michelle Alexander's excellent book The New Jim Crow[3], which focuses particularly on incarceration.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get... [2]: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... [3]: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ctp/The_New_Jim_Crow.pdf