Both conservative and liberal frames converge on black failure as the core assumption.

Evidence

Both conservatives and liberals rely on assumptions about black people. Conservatives tend to think of black people as responsible for their own failures. Liberals tend to point to environments that make them fail. In both instances, the constant refrain is that black people fail. What gets lost in all this are the actual lives of real black people. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 544

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Distills the entire chapter’s thesis into a compact claim: the failure-narrative is not one party’s error but a shared perceptual grid structuring American political options.