When Michael Wayne was a young boy in Toronto, his mother used to take the family to New York to watch Michael’s father, comedian Johnny Wayne and his partner Frank Shuster, perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. The excitement of visiting a large U.S. city had a profound impact on Michael who grew up to become a professor of American history at the University of Toronto. Now a professor emeritus, Michael Wayne has written several books on American history, including his latest, Imagining Black America.

My conversation with Michael Wayne has been edited for length.

Help me understand the title of your book, Imagining Black America.

When I started teaching, scientists were saying that race could not be understood as a biological concept. We all share the same DNA; biological differences are minute. Anthropologists, historians and economists argue, therefore, that race is a social construct, not a scientific one.

The first blacks arrived in North America in 1619. Did these people self-identify as blacks? Did they think of themselves as blacks? No. Race was imagined into existence in particular ways on this side of the ocean by the British colonists. They wanted to define who was black and what their role was in society.

Making blacks into slaves was a financial arrangement to help the owners of plantations. Here is where the imagining comes in. The ideas about slavery and race are ideas created by the elites of society. Slavery and the idea of race have to be imagined into existence.

You note the “United States was the first nation in human history conceived in white supremacy.”

I am sure this statement is going to get some people’s backs up but I don’t think anyone can doubt it was a white supremacist society.

The native peoples who occupied the land weren’t allowed to become American citizens and there was a law passed in the very first administration of George Washington that said only white people can be naturalized.

In 1751 Benjamin Franklin wrote: “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny . . . And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.”

The U.S. Declaration of Independence states all men are created equal. But the Founding Fathers didn’t see the Chinese, Japanese, Aboriginal peoples — or women — as equals. If you take the declaration seriously the whole idea of slavery becomes absurd.

How do we explain this? Historians note that people at the time had a racial filter. They believed “white” people were the only ones who had the capacity to live in a free, equal, democratic society.

Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and he wrote the Declaration of Independence. The men who wrote these documents didn’t think they were hypocrites. They thought it was patently obvious when they said “all men are created equal” that it meant white men.

Some of the things said later about Irish Catholics in the 1920s or Jews or Italians in the 1950s suggest they weren’t real white people. They were discriminated against, as were people of Asian ancestry and Hispanic background.

But the benefit in their minds was they were not the descendants of slaves and could eventually be assimilated.

A large portion of the prison population in the U.S. is made up of black men. Is this because of the spread of drugs in underprivileged communities? You quoted one black drug dealer who said crack seemed to become an epidemic overnight.

It’s not because drugs are rampant in the black community. Whites are more likely to buy drugs than blacks; whites are more likely to use drugs than blacks. My point is there is a profound difference being a black lawyer living in an integrated suburban neighbourhood and a black living in the inner city.

I quote one U.S. prosecutor who said: “It’s a lot easier to go out to the ’hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put our resources in an undercover [operation in a] community where there are potentially politically powerful people.”

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Drugs moved into the U.S. inner cities because people needed to make a living. Factories had left the inner cities and jobs went to the suburbs and then down to the South and then overseas.

I lived in Chicago for about eight years and I found the segregation, the divisions of neighborhoods into white and black, very upsetting. Chicago is not alone. You mention several other U.S. cities have the same problem. But Chicago is baffling. Here is a community that fought against slavery, a city in Abe Lincoln’s own state.

It has to do with immigrants. When immigrants came to the city they identified blacks as the bottom of the social order and they were insistent that they live in their own neighbourhoods.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan cut off money to the cities, middle-class whites had fled to the suburbs. And now, for the first time, the black middle class fled to the suburbs.

The North was just as racist as the South; it just manifested racism in a different way . . .

When Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation proclamation the papers in Chicago were furious. They said all these black people are going to move to Chicago. This is outrageous.

Blacks didn’t move north until they were welcomed and this started during World War I [when] there were labour shortages. But there were covenants created to keep people of African ancestry out of certain neighbourhoods.

The Black Power movement in the 1960s was very exciting. Radicals such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis and the whole Black Panther movement became chic. I remember reading about cocktail parties in New York which included composer Leonard Bernstein and members of the Black Panthers.

In the long run this movement seemed to have little impact.

You will find differences of opinion about this. There are certainly plenty of scholars who argue that because of the image of strength they portrayed it was important in giving young blacks a sense of empowerment and helping them push for more change. They made blacks proud of being black.

The message of black Americans has always been: ‘Okay, you laid it down in the Declaration of Independence. We expect you to live up to your values.’ The Black Panthers questioned racism in American society but they didn’t deal with poverty. They didn’t call for a class revolution.

The situation of blacks in American didn’t change much in the 20th century, despite laws to help the indigent, like those passed by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. And there was also the influence of Martin Luther King. In fact, inner-city communities became poorer.

Some blacks did very well. The benefited from affirmative action, like Barack Obama. But these were among the most powerful people among the black population when blacks were all considered a single entity. Barriers were broken down, but not much was done to address poverty in the inner city.

Why are inner cities becoming poorer? The jobs that were there fled to the suburbs.

In the inner cities there is an increasingly large group of single black mothers. The poor have been left behind. If you want to deal with racism you need to deal with the inner city.

You quote a Pew Research Center Study that found 45 per cent of blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s fell into poverty in the early years of the 21st century. What is going to happen to black children?

So many of these children are going to be trapped in the inner city. They get targeted by the police. They get identified as not being good workers.

So what is going to happen to black children?

I am an historian, not a prophet. Unless the problem of inner-city poverty is addressed and there is some kind of redistribution of material resources and political power things will get worse.

These children don’t have a good future. The civil rights years liberated a small proportion of the black population. They live in an integrated world and self-identify as bi-racial or multi-racial. Many of them are saying ‘Why is this my problem? It’s society’s problem.’ And they are right.