The issue is that I was raised to believe that all Americans, regardless of race, have the same access to opportunities.

I think that is a very important message to send out. You have to get people to believe that they can (and should!) succeed, even once the opportunity is there, otherwise they might not try. [1]

Saying that if blacks get educated they can do better than non educated blacks, though not as well as non educated whites, is lunacy.

Worth pointing out that the numbers, though best for the white group, are not as bad as that.

For men and women, ages 25-44:

            none     high school   college
    white   17.5%     8.1%         3.7%
    black   26.9%    14.0%         7.4% [2]

So, for each step up in education, the black person has a better chance than the white person on the level below. 26.9% is still a scary large number, though I'd like to think that the no-high school group is only a small proportion of the overall population.

(Also, yes, I've only been to the US a couple of times, but I'm not sure in which that affects my interpretation of these numbers.)

[1] Reminds me of the "How to get women into CS" discussion, I'm sure all the same arguments apply. See: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum/PAPERS/TransformingTheCulture.p...

[2] See what I did there, ignore half the data to make my point clearer? Because I felt bad about it, I'm going to include the whole set here:

              none     high school   college
    hispanic  13.1%     9.6%         4.9%
    other     13.6%     9.4%         4.8%
    white     17.5%     8.1%         3.7%
    black     26.9%    14.0%         7.4%

Now, before I did that, I hadn't noticed: if you're not going to finish high school, better make sure you're not white or black.

Eh, and there goes my unqualified optimism too. If you're hispanic/mixed/other and didn't finish high school, you've still got a better chance than a black person who did. Oops.

[3] And another point: I'd like to see the relative sizes of these "race" groups. I'm sure in the long term, that "mixed" group is going to become the largest.