This is a topic I have studied and thought about extensively since college.
One element of these discussions that is often missed is that Democrats also have bought off the leaders and upper middle and upper class among blacks. How? Affirmative action dramatically helps them more than poor blacks. If you are well educated and have resources but you happen to be black you have a massive advantage. That goes from getting into colleges (though the SC ruling is having some marginal impact), scholarships, jobs after school, promotions, and especially business ownership in dealing with the government just for starters. You also had cottage industries that were created like Diversity departments that essentially created high paying jobs for middle and upper middle class blacks to do nothing. The leaders have consulting groups or other organizations that effectively extort money from businesses, this is where folks like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson made bank.
It's a huge temptation. If you fit one of those categories you may feel that its wrong or unfair that you get an advantage because of the color of your skin or know that the policies enacted weren't meant to benefit people like yourself but rather people in actual need but how do you turn down all of that money and opportunity? I remember a black kid who sat next to me in high school that I had better grades and SAT's than he did. I was able to get into A&M and UT. He got into Vanderbilt and got a monster scholarship. Now they have adjusted some of those policies over time but that's simply a matter of figuring out new ways to game the system.
Of course the inevitable problem that happened in admissions was many black kids were failing out at increasingly higher rates. I remember Thomas Sowell writing about this in
Preferential Policies 30 plus years ago. The response? Create more garbage majors like African American Studies. Massive grade inflation where no one fails and graduation rates at elite schools were 90 percent plus. Essentially instead of basing off of merit and letting things naturally fall they changed the system, primarily at private schools. One issue I never hear talked about either is this has absolutely destroyed blacks majoring in a lot of engineering fields. Ironically if you find a black person at a top school majoring in engineering the odds are they are an immigrant or the child of immigrants and likely Christians from places like Nigeria. I do technical recruiting and the amount of US born black engineers I have apply from top schools is almost non existent, that wasn't the case 20 years ago. Why major in something hard like engineering though if you can make 6 figures in Diversity and you don't really have to work? It's very frustrating to me because I don't like to see skin color and I know there are some absolutely brilliant black kids that simply aren't being pushed into those fields where they could make an impact.
The key to selling it is to buy off the leaders and the upper middle class. If you do that then the masses below them are less likely to even know there is another path.
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Ronald Reagan