Brandi Grayson co-founded Young, Gifted and Black and now runs Urban Triage, an organization that provides educational support, teaches parenting skills and promotes wellness to help black families become self-sufficient.

The problem, some say, is that disparities impact a population that has little political or economic clout. And white people, who control the levers of commerce and government, address only pieces of an interconnected web of issues that include child development, education, economics and criminal justice.

“None of this has changed,” said Kaleem Caire, a local educator who’s running One City Schools, a charter school to address the challenges that keep minority and low-income kids from succeeding in school. “The achievement rate has gotten worse. The failure rate of kids has gotten worse. We would keep thinking that we were solving the problem, the United Way and all of these organizations jump on it, but it doesn’t change a thing.”

She said elimination of racial disparities would require a seismic shift in attitude throughout society, which would take years, maybe generations. In the meantime, she said, government has to enact policies that enforce equitable treatment of people in housing, health care, education, employment and criminal justice.

But what about Baltimore, a 70 percent black city where black people control the levers of government? If Baltimore is a food desert, where capital flees and outside corporate investments are a rarity, isn’t this but a reflection of the type of community individual blacks collectively create?

Why must we continue to see this egalitarian experiment mandated as a great moral cause, when the results decade after decade – regardless of the amount of money invested in this revolt against nature – are all the same?

ORDER IT NOW

It’s an old saying, first written here almost a decade ago, but it holds true: we could have been on Mars, but we decided invest untold trillions in our underclass, believing at some point in the not-too-distant future all racial disparities between blacks and whites would go away.

Well, it’s now the not-too-distant future, and they’ve only gotten worse. And Mars is still 140 million miles away.