The Black Tax: why have African Americans been cheated for so long?

If we're looking at America - maybe it would be useful to talk about the historic treatment of the Native Americans, or of the Chinese, or the Catholics, or the Irish, the Italians, women, ...

Or about very similar systems of "many humans are second/third/fourth/etc. class, and rights are mostly for the first-class ones" - which were perfectly normal in Europe, for centuries and millennia before the first African American was even born.

OTOH, that kinda talk could really upset the simplistic little worldviews of most of the folks trying to mine themselves a pile of performative virtue gold out of this mess. And what could those dear precious first-classers do, to keep scoring themselves more self-rightous street cred, if things actually started getting better? We can't risk that...