Black Americans, common sense and our future

Why do we ignore common sense when it comes to Blacks in America? I remember reading an article on Shelby Steele, one of our nation’s most insightful writers on race relations, when he said, "The only thing that makes me interesting as a writer is that I’m just talking common sense. The most ordinary, everyday sort of common sense." What he was saying here was that his writing on the pathologies facing blacks, from affirmative action to the permanent underclass, were so obvious that it was just common sense.