Politicians regularly deploy this type of shaming when referring to, or even when addressing, black Americans. But it’s hard to fathom a politician, Democrat or Republican, standing before a predominately white crowd in a sagging old coal town, and blaming the community’s economic woes on poor parenting or lack of work ethic or a victim mentality. Those Americans, white Americans, are worthy of government help. Their problems are not of their own making, but systemic, institutional, out of their control. They are never blamed for their lot in life. They have had jobs snatched away by bad federal policy, their opportunities stolen by inept politicians.

It would have been easy, expected, for Trump in his speeches to recycle the same old personal-responsibility narrative for black voters. But Trump didn’t call for black people to stop lazing around and use a little more elbow grease on those bootstraps. He was pushing for more government — Republican-led government — to help black folks prosper, a racially specific new deal that included investing in schools, high-wage jobs and black entrepreneurs. And in doing so, Trump, at least rhetorically, did something the Democrats and Republicans have largely failed to do — he took black citizens into the ranks of “hardworking Americans” worthy of the government’s hand.

To be clear, I am not arguing that the man who called for the execution of the since-exonerated Central Park Five (and who still insists on their guilt) and who seeks nationwide implementation of the stop-and-frisk program ruled unconstitutional in New York City, and who warns that voting in heavily black cities is rigged, is a racial progressive who will enact policies that will help black communities. Nor am I saying black voters should buy what Trump is selling. (And they aren’t: A poll released last week by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College of likely voters in Pennsylvania found that “no black respondent from Philadelphia supported Mr. Trump in the survey.”)

What I am saying is that when Trump claims Democratic governance has failed black people, when he asks “the blacks” what they have to lose, he is asking a poorly stated version of a question that many black Americans have long asked themselves. What dividends, exactly, has their decades-long loyalty to the Democratic ticket paid them? By brushing Trump’s criticism off as merely cynical or clueless rantings, we are missing an opportunity to have a real discussion of the failures of progressivism and Democratic leadership when it comes to black Americans.

Trump is not wrong when he says that black Americans have suffered in a particular way in blue cities and blue states. (Of course, they suffer in red states as well.) The most segregated cities have long been clustered above the Mason-Dixon line and are Democratically run. Some of the most segregated schools in the country educate students in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee. Efforts to integrate schools in these cities have met resistance from white progressives. Democrats did as much to usher in the era of mass incarceration as anyone else. And in these cities, with their gaping income inequality, black communities shoulder a terrible burden of gun violence, high unemployment, substandard schools and poverty.

Though black Americans these days consistently vote Democratic at higher margins than any other racial group, this wasn’t always the case. Before 1948, black voters were fairly evenly split between Republican and Democrats. Then President Harry S. Truman pushed a civil rights platform, and a majority of black voters swung Democratic, though a significant percentage still identified as Republican. That changed in the 1960s, when black voters moved en masse to the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson showed he was willing to lose the South in order to pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats abandoned the party to become Republicans, and Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a Southern strategy of stalling forward movement on civil rights. And the party of Lincoln came to be considered anathema to black progress.

In the intervening years, modern Democrats have been far more likely to support social programs that help the poor, who are disproportionately black, and to support civil rights policies. But since Johnson left office, Democrats have done little to address the systemic issues — housing and school segregation — that keep so many black Americans in economic distress and that make true equality elusive. At the federal level, despite the fact that the National Fair Housing Alliance estimates that black Americans experiences millions of incidents of housing discrimination every year, Democrats, like Republicans, have avoided strong enforcement of federal fair-housing laws that would allow black families to move to opportunity-rich areas. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to pursue school-integration policies that would ensure black children gain access to the good schools white kids attend. In the 1970s and ’80s, Trump battled housing-discrimination lawsuits, while Senator Clinton was noticeably quiet when Westchester County, N.Y., a county that twice voted decidedly for Obama, fought a court order to integrate its whitest towns, including Chappaqua, the 2-percent-black town she calls home.