I'm a Black Man. Growing up there was a realization that being alive and out of trouble over the age of 21 was an accomplishment. This would extend to middle class. Due to a history of American apartheid, there were often just a few degrees of separation between middle class and working/poor class kin.
In the US we had segregation, not apartheid. There is a difference. As a white man living in the South, we still have segregation in practice. I rarely had interaction with blacks because they did different things and took different classes at school. We all went to the same schools---just didn't have the same classes or have the same social circles. Not much shared in the way of culture. I have had some black friend…
This is so clearly untrue that I wonder if it's worth pointing out the obvious. In fact, black-skinned Americans rarely have had the option of self-determination, and mostly that is due to white-skinned contemporaries who enslaved them, forced them into ghettos, segregated them in public life, and denied them political rights, and social and economic opportunity.
More concretely, in the southeastern United States, blacks were slaves (something local whites fought a war to try to preserve; take a step back and think how bizarre that is) and after that oppressed: They couldn't eat in the same restaurants, go to the same schools work the same jobs, live in the same neighborhoods, sleep at the same hotels; talking to a white-skinned women could result in a black-skinned male being lynched. Even today, there is much discrimination; consider whether they can join certain college fraternities in Oklahoma, for example, or walk the streets without being harassed or worse.
To suggest social segregation is due to the choices of black-skinned Americans is absurd.