There is a cost to ignorance and the hate that can grow from it. In his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in 2015 by Dylann S. Roof, President Obama spoke of the proud history of Reverend Pinckney’s church and community. He noted that we couldn’t know what the killer understood of the community or the lives he was taking, but he did know hate. Mr. Roof was found guilty of that Charleston massacre on Thursday, his violent acts a reminder — not one we needed — of the price ignorance and hate can exact.

“I would be a president for all of the people, African-Americans, the inner cities,” President-elect Trump declared during the second presidential debate. “Devastating what’s happening to our inner cities,” he lamented. “You go into the inner cities and — you see it’s 45 percent poverty. African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities.”

Mr. Trump’s views on black people, poverty and cities were quickly challenged as myopic and ill informed. But the administration he is building is emblematic of his ignorance.

The only African-American member of his designated cabinet is Ben Carson, who was tapped for Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Carson was a beloved American icon, a man who endured a hardscrabble childhood in Detroit to become a famous physician. But his turn to right-wing petulance, with a bow to kooky comparisons of Obamacare to slavery, considerably soiled his reputation. If his story was once emblematic of beating the odds to become a success, he is now a different kind of symbol — of how little Mr. Trump knows, or cares, about African-Americans.

Similarly, his pick of Senator Jeff Sessions as his attorney general — a man who according to testimony before Congress once joked that the only problem with the K.K.K. was the group’s drug use, deemed a white lawyer with black clients a race traitor and dismissed civil rights groups as “un-American” — proves Mr. Trump cares little for the interests of the African-American citizens he will serve in the Oval Office.