The myth that America has somehow become post-racial with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency was most succinctly nailed by the Rev. Eugene Rivers, in a fire and brimstone address at the regional high school on Wednesday.

“There is one black man in the White House and a million black men in prison,” he thundered.

The big question, though, for Reverend Rivers, along with 30-odd other speakers — judges, lawyers, academics, media personalities, a couple of actors and a Congressman — was who bears the responsibility for that, and all the other manifestations of continuing black disadvantage in America.

To what extent is that responsibility a personal one, and to what extent is it collective?

The inspiration for the debate was President Obama himself, and his challenging address marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP last month in New York, in which he said: “Your destiny is in your hands, and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”

His 45-minute speech was far more nuanced and encoded than that, of course, even if the bit about individual responsibility was the most quoted part (particularly by conservative pundits, who took it as an affirmation of their biases).

And it was to explore those nuances that the speakers gathered on Wednesday for a debate — multiple debates, actually, over many hours — moderated by Harvard Prof. Charles Ogletree.

The answer was essentially this: that the choice between individual and collective responsibility was a false dichotomy.

The consensus was that the cause of the problems of continuing black disadvantage were a mix of personal and structural, with the emphasis on the structural. But the solution would depend most heavily on individuals, particularly those members of the black community described by Reverend Rivers as “high and lifted up.”

His was the most challenging speech.

“Most of us who are lifted up right, living large in charge . . . celebrate ourselves and a brother in the White House,” he declaimed.

“And there’s almost no discourse on what we do about the one million black men.”

He attacked — there is no other word for it — the black elite “who celebrate themselves” while ignoring the plight of “the wretched of the earth.”

As evidence of the black elite’s self-concern, he cited its focus on the recent arrest of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis (Skip) Gates in Cambridge.

Yet just five days after that, a young black girl was shot in her home when “an AK 47 was used by a 17-year-old terrorist” to spray a city building with bullets. One of them passed through three walls before hitting the girl.

“There was not one word said. There were no invitations to the White House,” he said.

“All across this country, the black underclass is suffering. There’s been no discourse or conversation about our moral responsibility to those whom we left behind. Shame on us, after we’ve achieved everything we’ve achieved.

“The great moral challenge for black America is not about a black in the White House, but we reconcile with the fact that there are now two separate black nations: those who live and die in the ghetto and those of us who celebrate our beauty . . . .”

He warned that within a decade those ghettos could produce unimaginable problems. He suggested home-grown terrorism. Saudi Arabian money was financing Wahabist Islam chaplaincies in inner cities and jails, to politicize alienated young black men.

On the subject of President Obama’s speech, Howard Manly, the executive editor of the black-owned Boston newspaper, the Bay State Banner, noted the media coverage had focused largely on a tiny percentage of what Mr. Obama had to say.

The president spoke at greater length about the social context of black disadvantage, the health and education disparities, the high incarceration rates, “the notion that black kids have, that they cannot be anything more than a rapper or a ball player,” Mr. Manly said.

“He didn’t just put that all on black folks; he put that on structural inequalities,” he added.

If you looked at survey results, said Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, you saw that black people were the ones most committed to notions of personal responsibility. He himself was a strong believer in personal responsibility, and his views “were not always well received.”

That was not to say that there was no great need for the society and the state to address the structural contributors, particularly “perverse laws” which played a role in the mass incarceration of African-Americans. But the fact remained that “a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by our young people,” he said.

Reggie Walton, a judge of the U.S. District Court, said Reverend Rivers had his numbers wrong: in reality there were probably two million black men locked up on any given day in one penal institution or another.

As evidence of the structural unfairness of the justice system, he noted the disparity between the sentences imposed for possession of crack cocaine — mostly used by people of color — and powder cocaine — mostly used by whites.

He admitted to being a tough-sentencing judge, but said he also was troubled by such unfairnesses in the system.

Another federal judge, Nancy Gertner, noted such unfairness was inseparable from politics.

What she called “the greatest incarceration of African-Americans since reconstruction” had served to “de-racialize the race debate” by redefining imprisonment — which results in most cases with a denial of voting rights — not as an issue of civil rights anymore, but simply as a matter of “these people are bad,” she said.

And Democratic Cong. Barney Frank pushed the political aspect one step further, arguing political conservatives used race as a weapon in their efforts to maintain inequities which affect not only black Americans, but all Americans.

“I believe there are people in this society who are opposed to the efforts to make things . . . less unfair economically,” he said. And he cited the push for health care reform as one area in which race was a subtext to the opposition.

“I have yet to see an African-American up there complaining about health care [reform]” Mr. Frank said.

The discussion went off in other directions too. Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz suggested “lingering racism” within elements of the Jewish community contributed to early opposition to Mr. Obama’s candidacy. And apprehension about how the President was dealing with Israel posed a continuing problem for relations between the Jewish community and the first black President.

Harvard Business School Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggested strengthened notions of personal responsibility were important not only to black America, but to America’s financial sector.

The conversation was provocative and far-reaching. But the most affecting moments were when panelists talked case studies of the black underclass. Judge Glenda Hackett was notable in this, as was Sonia Sohn, former star of the television show The Wire.

Ms. Sohn has taken time out from her acting career to work with underprivileged black youths in Philadelphia. After telling of that experience she, like the Reverend Rivers, challenged her middle-class audience and panelists to address the disconnect with the other black community.

She called on privileged blacks to get back into the inner cities and help. She even tacitly criticized the rather abstract, intellectual discussion Professor Ogletree had put on.

“This should be a planning meeting,” she said. “We should be strategizing.

“We need a web, well let’s sew it up.”