Here's a few tips from a self-taught musician who couldn't read sheet music if you paid me to:

- Analyze songs that you like. While reading sheet music (as other's have mentioned) is certainly a good approach, take time to find songs you actually enjoy listening to. If the song is guitar driven (as many are in today's popular music), you can find "tabs" online. They're a little weird to decipher at first, but you'll be able to extract the notes, and transpose it to piano.

- Then take a melody, for example, and play it back. What scale degrees are they playing? Did they start on something other than the I (or i)? What part of the melody did you like, specifically? How did the melody change over the course of the song? Lots of little lessons to be learned. You can apply this to chords as well.

- Next, pay attention to the rhythm. I find this part left out of a lot of discussions surrounding music theory. When you play a note is as important, or often times, more important than the note itself. There's a seemingly infinite number of ways to play even the simplest set of notes.

- Finally, just play. Take whatever small lesson you learned, and improvise something. Over time, you'll commit all the little things you like to memory, and the music will just flow out of you (sorry if that sounds corny).

Cultural emphasis on educational achievement and hard work, for one.

From a policy perspective, it makes more sense to assume that past and present bias---which we know exists---is a more likely explanation than genetic inferiority (for which there is no evidence). The burden of proof is on the racial supremicists to provide support for their position, not on the government.

To be fair, I did say comparable background, which can include education. There easily is enough immigrants, even poor uneducated ones lacrosse decades to make this comparison.

From what I read, poor and average immigrants do great, even African ones. Even more so, the first generation born in the US.

My greater point doesn't negate the impact of past treatment. If anything, it's strongly supports it. What I think it adds to the conversation is the idea that the challenge is very different than overly simplistic model of skin color discrimination which most people around usually try to reduce everything to.

Miss attribution of the root cause leads to ineffective Solutions.

I agree that historic impacts can be scoped into the definition of systemic racism, but that doesn't mean that other tenants of systemic racism are not overstated or incorrect.

Comparing modern African immigrants to modern day Black Americans descended from enslaved people is not going to get you a clean comparison by any means. Modern African immigrants are one the most highly educated groups of people in the US. And many of them come having already attained that education due to family money, intelligence, whatever. The poor or even average African immigrants has little chance of making it here. In other words, you are comparing an all star team to the general population.

And yes, biases of past treatment is one of the main issues that many are trying to correct with affirmative action-like programs. There doesn't have to be any modern, active racism at all to try and correct the terrible damage done in the past on a systemic basis. In many cases, this past injustice is exactly what systemic racism is referring to.

Yes, sub-saharan diversity is even more diverse. But diversity among African Americans is still much higher than that of the white population. In fact, most African Americans descended from enslaved have 20-40% European/white DNA (and for unspeakable reasons, most of that DNA is of the supposedly wealthy, elite, most intelligent white progenitors of this country). So I just see no way to make any useful extrapolations based on genetics. Especially considering the externalities involved in being Black in America.

I think the more telling test for bias (genetic, social, or otherwise) is to compare groups with long standing US ancestry with recent immigrants of the same background and education.

My understanding is that while we attribute much of inequality to bias in treatment, recent immigrants and their decedents vastly outperform comparable individuals with the same skin color.

To me, this indicates that much of the differences we observe are due to biases of past treatment, opposed to discriminatory treatment in the present.