Jews and Blacks

A couple of nights ago we went to friends for a preThanksgiving dinner, just the four of us together and thus a chance to sit and talk seriously after we had had the delicious food our hostess  prepared.  The assembled foursome all retired ranged in age from 76 to 95, and brought interesting points and experience to the talk. The subject was the ethnic and class animosities that the president elect was fanning among his supporters.  We in the room were two upper class WASPS, another born into a low income laboring class from an immigrant mix of predominantly Irish, but some German, and the last a multimillionaire self succeeded Jewish man whose childhood ghetto home was where Yiddish and Polish were spoken.  The subject was the demonstrable underchievement in school of children from the inner city, and how these academies which recruit them try furiously to leap them over the hurdle of apathy so as to get them into the nervous making track of compulsive success struggle which will plunge them into the direction of Harvard and the other accepted goals.  I thought how I had internalized that struggle as a small white upper class boy (failure or even low grades were unthinkable for me and my friends; I never missed a day of school even the day after my father's death in a car accident when I was six).  Two others described teaching elite suburban schools where failure was not an option for the children.  The three of us were describing anxiety and tension as the norm both at school and at home.  Success was not an option but a demand, a given.  The Jew complained of the rift between Jew and black and wondered why it was so since they were both needing to succeed through the antagonism of their Gentile/white classmates. We ta;led about the natural or inbuilt instinct to over succeed drove jewish children, whereas black children were conditioned to know that black skin in the United States signals failure. We all agreed that the American culture has never been honest about the brutality of slavery nor the horrors and cruelties of the Reconstruction period. Where do we have museums that expose the torture and brutality that the enslaved Africans endured?  Where are our Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen?  where are the bronze plaques showing where a black man was lynched?  It was all agreed that Germany had come  to find rest with the horror the Germans had created but centuries on the Americans are hiding to their hurt an ugly ugly truth which lies beneath the hearts of all of us.  Part of the American horror is that this discussion takes place again and again with no blacks present because the social divide is enormous.
Who has a black friend with whom one can really talk honestly?