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I've heard this too from my left-leaning friends (complaining that the suburbs and outskirts are disconcerting because they have too many white people and too little diversity) and thought it was... ridiculous. Yes, North America does indeed have a predominantly white population, and any large immigrant population is inevitably going to be in the cities. It's not as if the outskirts are going to be filled with immigrants pursuing the luxurious dream of working on a farm in Manitoba.
While I'm not in the least progressive, you asked for a steelman, so I'll try to provide one. The only possible way I can think of to steelman this and try to defend it as a legitimate complaint is that their surface-level aesthetic objection to predominantly-white areas seems to be based on a deeper underlying belief that areas that are insufficiently diverse are also going to be insufficiently accepting and welcoming, and thus won't align with their values system. Thus they don't like it.
Of course, even if I accept this premise it's not hard to see how this logic is only ever selectively applied against whites - these criticisms will absolutely never be levelled at neighbourhoods made up of black people or Hispanics (who as a group exhibit a more severe racial in-group bias than whites do), and for the most part they won't level this criticism at countries which are more monoethnic than the West either (e.g. China) as long as these countries' populations are primarily made up of PoC especially since going to Asia and complaining about how the demographics are just too yellow is something that would likely make them very uncomfortable.
It's quite clear that many leftists expect whites to take every step conceivable to make sure they are racially conscious and accepting (even if this would entail completely overhauling their countries' demographics in furtherance of this aim), and this onus will never get placed on other races. It's just hypocrisy to the extreme, in my opinion, and their standards for white people are so much more stringent than any other group of people out there it's almost farcical.
To be fair, these people never actually live in majority-minority places. I almost never see these people in places like the Bronx that are absolutely dominated by minorities. They just know places like Brooklyn or whatever. I might be damning them through faint praise here. I don't know.
Also, to be fair to these minorities, I actually have lived in the Bronx as a white person, and minorities are generally pretty nice to me. It's other minorities that they are biased against.
Well, to be correspondingly fair to white people, I'm an Asian immigrant to a Western country. My assessment is that white people are generally nice to me as well, both in the cities and the outskirts (and this holds regardless of the racial composition of the area). In my opinion, the entire idea of "too white = prejudiced" should be thrown out in the first place, but if we're applying these principles, we should be applying them fairly across the board.
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