Perhaps the most impenetrable veil of (stubborn, willful) ignorance encountered in discussions involving racial/minority inequality in economic achievement, Is ignorance about how the market works, when it is allowed to work, to erode such inequalities and to do so better than any proposed policy or sets of policies can do.
Most intellectuals in the mainstream today are social planners who cannot conceive that it is not possible to erase persistent social gaps by tinkering with its manifestations, or even that such tinkering serves to makes things worse and exacerbate the polarization that comes from these gaps.
The most plausible cause of these gaps is inadequate basic schooling. As this op-ed by Jason Riley, and many other sources, confirm the poorest elements of our population, among whom some minorities are disproportionately represented, are also the least educated (many barely able to read and write even after a public school education). They are the least prepared for college or employment.
The solution of the "liberal" and "progressive" social reformers is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. So they invent ways of facilitating success for those unprepared to achieve it on their own by providing a easier route to success - easier courses, lower entry levels, etc. This patronizing paternalistic approach exacerbates racial consciousness and, arguably, resentment. And it compromises the link between competence and performance. It devalues the importance of merit, and puts people in positions they don't merit in which they are set up to fail. It then finds ways to overlook the failure and systemically erodes the average level of competence and achievement.
This approach can only be embraced and defended in stubborn ignorance of how market social processes work. School choice for example, by harnessing the dispersed knowledge of teachers, parents and students and providing parental choice to follow the incentives to better educate their children by choosing among many options, would transform the situation into one in which millions of minority children would escape the badly-education-poverty trap. It really is a no-brainer.