Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point . As William Faulkner once wrote , “ The past isn ´ t dead and buried . In fact , it isn ´ t even past . ” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country . But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African - American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow .