We must know the whole story. We must share the whole story.

Yet, to fully understand the current reality of being Black in America absent an analysis of the socio-economic factors affecting Black Americans for the past 400 years is at least incomplete.

Race, civics, and economics have particularly permeated the perception of Black America-internally and externally. When the first Africans were brought to the shores of North America in what was to become Jamestown, Va., the Virginia Company of London, England shipped them.

Immediately, dark-skinned Africans were readily identifiable by color, and by their origins of West African nations, were well-suited for the physical work in humid conditions. Africans were initially declared indentured servants, and then legally rendered slaves for life by the Virginia House of Burgesses (now the Virginia General Assembly). Targeted economic exploitation based on race was written in blood on the Charter of America, Incorporated.

The false notion of cultural supremacy (Anglo/White) shaped the formation of the new nation’s economic order, paid by the dividends of dehumanization. The record reflects that the origin of the United States of America is rooted in economic exploitation of Black people (and Red, Brown, and Yellow people).

Likewise, the Colonial Constitutional denial of citizenship and the current attacks on voting rights by federal and state courts on Black people in America has cast a cloud on how many Americans view Black people.

Internally, the perception of being Black in America has been shaped into what Dr. W.E.B. Dubois referred to as the ambivalent veil of dual consciousness—African and American. Many Blacks, despite their educational and material success, never feel completely comfortable as first-class citizens.

Therefore, to address Being Black in America in 2008 without reviewing the wretched record of America on African Americans is to suggest that Black people—descendants of Nubian priests, scholars, warriors, builders, and business owners—are somehow genetically destined for demographic devolution.

The Prison Industrial Complex must share the shame of the 50 percent dropout rate for Black American males. The legal separation of Black families in the Slave Trade (and later by the federal welfare system) must share the shame of 70 percent out-of-wedlock Black births. The absence of employment opportunities for qualified Black people must be considered in the high crime rate in Black America. While personal responsibility is everyone’s duty to self, the group-levied, systemic and structural obstacles placed on the back of Blacks by the public and private sectors must too be accountable.

In other words, a ghetto is not the presence of Black people, but the absence of jobs and capital. And racial equality does not result from a Black man in the White House, but from cross-cultural respect, equal protection under the law, and equal access to economic opportunity.

Toward that end, Senator Barack Obama’s idea of a White House Office on Urban Policy is a good one for the American working poor, disproportionately Black.

The origins and the outcomes must be part of being Black in America. We must know the whole story. We must share the whole story.

(Gary L. Flowers is executive director & CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, Inc. This column was distributed by the NNPA.)