I appreciate your sharing this Bernard.
Unfortunately, some blacks are going to always feel like victims no matter what they attain materially or otherwise. A price tag can't be placed on what black people have experienced, and that is why you will see attitudes like what your neighbor has displayed. Success does not obliterate the feeling that whitey's out to get you.
From what I've seen and experienced, many "successful" blacks will hold on to victim status for several reasons:
1. They know no better.
2. They feel somewhat guilty about their success when so many other blacks are "poor and oppressed" and embracing victimology is their way of identifying with the black "masses."
3. Many blacks who have attained educational and material success still experience racism, especially if their living, working and/or social arrangements bring them around lots of whites. They don't know any other way to respond other than paranoid victimology.
To sum it up, blacks who are "successful" experience the double-consciousness of being Black and American more acutely than lower-class blacks do. This is why your neighbor can fly a US flag on the one hand and act as if you're trying to oppress him on the other hand. He holds obviously contradictory attitudes.
Mostly, blacks themselves have to change the perpetual victim attitude. Nobody can make them stop acting like victims. Some will change if they have enough positive interactions with whites; religion changes many; others may change as they see the illogic of many of the beliefs they have held so dear.
Some blacks feel that separation is the solution- your neighbor may not be one of them or else he wouldn't live in your neighborhood. At the same time, a lot of blacks who would like to separate or return to Africa do live in houses that cost six figures or more.
I'd advise you to keep treating your neighbor the way you would like to be treated and otherwise, don't worry about him. If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to feel guilty for so don't let him put you in that position.
That's what I've come to, but I can't see many signs in the Black community that point in that direction. I see increasing hostility (Maxine Waters, a Representative from a nearby area, is a case in point). Barbara Lee didn't do the concept of unity a lot of good, either, and neither do the Black Congressional Caucus, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and other influential Black organizations that focus mainly on divisive issues.
There's an old science fiction notion that an invasion of Earth by space aliens would unify all the peoples of the world against a common enemy. I had hoped that one good result of this attack on the U.S. would be the unification of all Americans against a common threat: Americans of all colors died in this tragedy. Jesse Jackson's attempt to carry out what can only be interpreted as a separatist "Black" foreign policy in opposition to that of the administration's, is a nasty symbol and very worrisome to me. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and wait to see the final result -- if he rescues Christian hostages that would be wonderful -- but the racial and political overtones of his venture are unmistakable and do not appear to be unifying.