> How do you reconcile this view with the fact that asians were also discriminated against, but now do better than whites?
There are places where blacks do better than whites. In the Bronx, New York, the standard of living went up because of an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants who made more than the local white population. But minorities with an earned advantage are outside consideration of equity policy, which is focused on providing unearned advantage for certain minority groups to compensate for centuries of unearned advantage held by whites.
> The way you described it, there is a perverse incentive for people at the bottom to stay at the bottom. Is that considered a problem?
No. Iron rule of 2020s American politics: Statements that may give power to "the enemy" if they were true are always to be considered false, and even taboo to talk about. To give an example, consider the following statement: There exist cisgender biological men who are very willing to put on a dress and pose as transgender women, for the purpose of creeping on women in ladies' restrooms. Without even an accusative reference to a particular purported transgender woman, this statement MUST be considered false, and even transphobic hate speech, because if true it would make policymakers hesitate to pass laws mandating that transgender people be permitted to use the facilities that match their stated gender identity.
Here's another one: The risk of serious side effects from getting the COVID vaccine is far less than the risk of serious complications from catching COVID. Watch the right squirm at that one, and even shout you down for proposing it, because to them accepting it means implicitly legitimizing Biden's vaccine mandates.
"Perverse incentives for people to stay at the bottom" sounds an awful lot like Reagan's "welfare queens" rhetoric from the 1980s, which was widely considered racist and even a "dogwhistle" (a coded statement designed to appeal to far-right racist without raising alarm among decent people), so discussing such perverse incentives is pretty much off the table in American policy discussion.