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Ah, the classic appeal to "innate abilities" and "culture" to explain why an oppressed group is disadvantaged. I guess you're asking an epistemogical question of how we can ever really "know" if oppression (slavery, sexual violence, genocide, idk how much history you've read) would explain inequality upon those lines. I don't know the answer, but I'm probably gonna go with occams razer on this one.

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As you imply, it is a very difficult question to answer. But isn't cultural variation often used to explain the advantageous social and economic position of Jews and East Asians in American society? And if cultural variation can explain this, is there some in principal reason why it cannot also explain disadvantage?

Again, I am not saying it explains all disadvantage that Blacks experience, just that I do not think oppression explains all of this disadvantage either.

Cultural variation is often circumstance driven; and centuries of de jure oppression is a pretty significant contributor to black culture in America. So throwing out "cultural variation" doesn't necessarily provide an alternative to oppression as an explanation so much as an explanation for one of the mechanisms by which oppression explains disadvantage.

"Cultural variation" used to explain why Jews were such good basketball players.

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