The Washington Highlands area of Milwaukee is the kind of suburb that says you’ve arrived. The lawns are immaculate: manicured green parcels bordering big, square-jawed houses. Each home is a hotchpotch of architectural styles. Clearly, most owners built the dwelling of their dreams themselves. Birdsong is the soundtrack, not traffic belching out fumes.

They were having their annual rummage sale in the neighbourhood when I arrived to chat about racism in the US for a film in which I would only talk to white people. Most Americans are courteous. After a few minutes these were also candid.

They were confessing to an outsider: I was a neutral priest. “I’m part of the problem,” Charles Wilkie told me, his red baseball hat shading a look of resignation. A retired businessman, he said it was easy for him to avoid so-called black America and fail to appreciate the privations, the struggles. “I don’t know how to solve the problem, so what do I do, I ignore it, and yes, a lot of people do that. It’s a lousy excuse and a poor answer. It’s much easier not to know.”

Washington Heights is a suburb of the most segregated city in America. Charles lives in a part of Milwaukee where the residents are 99% white, yet a few blocks up the street are black neighbourhoods where lawns are not manicured, shops are boarded up, many houses have repossession notices slapped on their front doors, and the air is one of decay and poverty. The separation of black and white in Milwaukee is replicated in big cities right across the US, and separation breeds a lack of empathy.

Members of Black Lives Matter DMV participate in the annual Martin Luther King Holiday Peace Walk in January 2016 in Washington, DC. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In Washington Heights I collared Paula Kieferndorf, a teacher in the public school system. “We’re on 68th Street, but if you go down to 49th Street – especially through the summer – you can hear gunshots a couple of blocks further down. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,” she said. “The next day the news will come on, and sure enough, there was a shooting of some young black man, or a girl caught in crossfire. There’s a lot of tragic things going on down there.”

I asked Becky Zrinsky, in her mid-30s, for her perception of the African Americans living a few blocks away. “It’s based purely on what I see on the news,” she said. “I’d like more information.”

I wanted to make a film about race in America, featuring only white people, because I was angry. Despite countless high-profile deaths of young black men at the hands of the police in recent years, nearly half of white Americans, according to a Pew Research Centre survey published this year, said they didn’t believe racism was a big problem in the US.

The statistics say it all. Half of black Americans who are born poor stay poor. Black students attend the worst schools

What world is white America living in? Surely the statistics say it all. Half of black Americans who are born poor stay poor; black students attend the worst schools; 1.6 million black men aged 24-54 have disappeared from civic life because they have died or are in prison. If you’re black in Milwaukee, and earning $100,000, you’ll be rejected for a mortgage as often as white people who are earning $20,000 are rejected. A black person with a college degree has less chance of finding a high-paying job than a white college dropout. The socio-economic data is damning. Is white America blind, or playing dumb?

And yet, curiously, attitudes were similar in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Gallup poll from 1963 showed that 66% of whites believed that black people were treated equally when it came to housing, education and employment. Another, from the year before, showed that 85% of white people believed black children had the same chances of a good education as white children.

In the age of Jim Crow, most white people had absolutely no idea what Martin Luther King was trying to do. Like millions around the world, I watched the video of the killing in 2014 of the black man Eric Garner on a television news report. He died in a “chokehold”, while being held down by several New York City police officers. Eleven times he gasped: “I can’t breathe.” No charges were brought against any of the officers.

Where was the march on Washington by all right-thinking white people, let alone black? Some white Americans stood shoulder to shoulder with blacks in the streets, but that man’s death deserved the attention of every white housewife, banker, lawyer, fireman, teacher, refuse collector, tax inspector, coal miner: the whole of white America should have stood up and said: enough.

In a tiny way, my trip to Milwaukee made me realise just how easy it is to avoid the unpalatable in America and to rely on a media too often interested in ratings rather than explanation. The race problem is a Gordian knot, one the US just can’t cut.

• Clive Myrie’s report, Race in America, will be broadcast on BBC2 today at 17.10