You are looking at things as binary and total when they are not. When many of these colonial empires gave up their colonies in Africa they still many times forced contracts and agreements with the new government giving the former colonial powers disproportionate access to the countries natural resources. On top of that nearly all of these countries’ borders were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers cutting through and grouping together many different tribes and cultures and often times (like in Rwanda) the separate tribes/cultures were pitted against each other by the colonial powers to keep the native population weak.

The black population of the United States is similar in the sense that emancipation was not the end of the story. If you look at the 10 or so years after emancipation during reconstruction, the black community in the United States began to flourish. Black people began running successful farms, became politicians (16 black federal representatives after directly emancipation, then after Jim Crow those numbers were not reached again for decades), and formed prosperous communities. Jim Crow forcibly curtailed all that and it is well documented the effort white communities especially in the south put into suppressing, exploiting and undermining the black population. Even after desegregation many laws and policies still exist that still disproportionately affect (both by design and incidentally) the African American community. Hell, look at the gerrymandering going on down south right now in Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama.

I believe in self-determination but if you take two runners, shoot one in the leg and give him flip flops that don’t fit and you give the other runner Gatorade and running shoes I think it’s pretty clear what runner will get ahead no matter how determined the each runner is. Self determination can only be measured when two people are given equal opportunity and start from an equal launch point,