I can only answer for Texas. Texas is stereotyped as racist and uneducated, but that only seems true when you don't compare across the same demographics. For high school diplomas and college degrees, if you compare whites to whites, blacks to blacks, Asians to Asians, Texas does very well [1]. The only ethnicity that this is not true for is Hispanics, but that is because Texas has a high proportion of non-English speaking Hispanics. If you were to break down the stats by English-speaking vs not, you would likely see Texas doing well by that metric as well.

Texas is very free in terms of choice. It's trivial to home-school. College admissions are very open to all races. If you're in the top 10% of your high school class, you automatically qualify for state universities, regardless of whether your school was lily white or deep in the hood. The Hazelwood Act provides 150 free credit-hours to military veterans and to a lesser extent to their spouses and children. In my meth-infested neck of the woods, the military is a common way for poor people to obtain job skills and/or a college education.

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Texas/Educational-Attainm...

>Share of Adults with at Least a Bachelor’s Degree: Double Weight (~36.36 Points)

that is the biggest contributor - so either they strongly and successfully promote African-American college education or there aren't much whites with college degrees.

Equality can have different shapes and different ways of achieving it. I for example come from the USSR where majority of the people enjoyed almost total economical equality ... of having almost nothing.