Where’s the empathy for black poverty and pain?

In the 1890s, sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois noticed something disturbing about how Americans viewed the plight of blacks in Philadelphia who had suffered through unsanitary living conditions, high rates of consumption and back-breaking labor. “The most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the well-being of the race,” he wrote. “There have, for instance, been few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference.”