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Notes -
Not really centuries though. If you are segregated you aren't going to assimilate into the culture you are segregated from.
"Restrictive covenants blocked black entry into many neighborhoods. Schools were openly segregated. Shopkeepers and theaters displayed “whites only” signs. Sugrue writes, “Even celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge and Marian Anderson had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they toured the North.”"
"In 1964, he tried to open public construction sites to black workers by suing New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, charging they were turning an unconstitutional blind eye on craft union discrimination. New York’s highest court, however, was unimpressed, ruling 7-0. But three years later, our office won a similar case in a federal trial court against Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes."
Even now many northern cities are de facto segregated, even if it does not have any legal backing. You can only assimilate into a culture if you are spending time in that culture (and that culture is willing to spend time with you). As mentioned by other's Italian-American culture only began to assimilate as other groups shared space with them.
African-American culture is the result of assimilation, it just wasn't assimilation into the broader American culture, but one picking up what little came across from Africa, plus from the poor borderers and the like they were surrounded by. It certainly isn't much like actual African cultures (hence why you get clashes between newer African immigrants and ADOS).
So now to assimilate them, you would have to have them exposed on a daily basis in and around the culture you want them to take on, and undo the previous behaviors that have been internalized. But that does have costs to the broader culture and there will be frictions due to historical racial grievances. Or to put it another way, very few people progressive or otherwise want black kids bussed into their schools, for quite understandable reasons in many cases. So we're stuck.
My wife is black and when I got to family events, I am usually the only white person there, or perhaps one other at most. When I stayed at her mother's house I might see one or two other white people within a couple of blocks. You can't assimilate to a culture you barely experience.
ADOS had a very different path to where they are now than any voluntary group of immigrants. So we shouldn't expect them to integrate in the same way.
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