Long undisturbed rocks of the American legacy have been overturned in recent years, and with each one, more of the racism that is deeply embedded in the US’s soil is exposed for all of us to confront.

For many Americans, 1 June marked the overturning of one more such rock. A hundred years ago, a white mob violently leveled the thriving ‘Black Wall Street’ community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An estimated 300 people were killed. Well over 1,200 buildings were destroyed, some by fire bombs from private planes. One estimate puts the cost of the damage at more than $200m in today’s dollars.

Yet this cataclysmic moment in American history – in which victims were not compensated and perpetrators were not punished – was so efficiently buried that decades later even some Black Tulsa residents were surprised to learn this happened. And it was not until 100 years later that a US president, Joe Biden, actually went to the scene of the horror to pay homage to its victims and call the evil out for what it was.

We know that the virulent racism that destroyed Greenwood was not a singular episode but a raging river that has shaped our history and our present in the most fundamental ways – etching barriers to creating a society in which each of us is valued and bonded in a sacred circle of mutuality. Yet, while America’s powerful and privileged have never been shy about redesigning natural landscapes – often in foolish, self-defeating ways – to serve the interests of capital, these same people resist the deep structural and moral excavation needed to undo the corruption racism has done to America’s topology, even as some of them profess a desire for racial equity and reparative justice.

Hence we have what President Biden brought to Tulsa on that day: a set of proposals to address structural racism and its consequences that was at once an exceptional statement of policy and a tragic missed opportunity.

It is true that the proposals to “build Black wealth and narrow the racial wealth gap” are positive attempts to address serious consequences of the US’s structural racism. Initiatives such as funding for tearing down highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods, investigating the wealth theft that occurs through racism in home appraisals, and a $10bn revitalization fund, which promises to give communities more of a say in how revitalization takes place, are correctives to evils that should never have been allowed to persist into the 21st century.

Collectively, however, they are superficial repairs to a rotted foundation, steps one might take if they did not want to go through the trouble and expense of ripping up the foundation and starting anew. But have we not learned that under our current system new cracks will appear, and without true reparative justice new traumas will be piled on top of the old ones?

America’s racial wealth gap is an already vast chasm that is getting wider, not narrower, especially in the context of the disproportionate economic and health impact COVID-19 has had on Black people. One Brookings study estimates the gap – the additional wealth that would reside in Black households if their share of the wealth matched their share of the population – today at more than $10.1tn. That’s almost half the entire country’s gross domestic product. Put another way: in the context of America’s extreme wealth concentration, the richest 400 people in America collectively hold more wealth than all 42 million Black Americans. This gap will never close if we insist on treating the cancer of structural racism with bandages and aspirin.

This is what Dr Martin Luther King Jr saw when he concluded in 1967 that it is a fool’s errand to aim to put Black people on an equal footing with White people in a system that is fundamentally morally bankrupt. “We have been in a reform movement,” he wrote then. “But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution.

“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed.”

America, given the current state of its cultural and political fabric, is clearly not ready to make this step. It is the reason that pronouncements like this from King have been whitewashed from the canon on which his acceptance into American political sainthood is based. But America must make itself ready if it expects to survive as a country worthy of its promise – or to survive its ongoing cold civil war at all.