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Breaking the consistent association between Race and Class. I hold the occasionally popular Materialist view on racism, that where Race does not intersect with economic class and competition there is no racism despite visual differences in race.* Where individuals of one race are always in a superior or a subordinate role, resentment and oppression build up.
I grew up in a well off rural-exurban area. Vastly white, but with a good sprinkling of Asians and a few Blacks and Hispanics. There was relatively little racism in any serious way. People were, of course, holding bad attitudes or making bad jokes, but there wasn't tension. Most of the Black kids I knew growing up were just as middle class as the white or Asian kids. I'd imagine most of the really rich people I knew were white, and that I knew few poor Asians, if I counted it up. But it wasn't predictable enough to worry about. Humans are bad at percentages, a slight change in likelihood won't really create dangerous stereotypes, it takes serious hit-you-in-the-face obviousness.
Then I moved to NYC, and for the first time I felt racial tension. And the reason to me was obvious. At home the odds of any given waitress/janitor/bus driver/cop/criminal being White were overwhelmingly high, and their odds of being Black/Hispanic/Asian was low enough as to be essentially even with the odds of any passerby or customer being whatever race. In NYC, in so many places, the customers were overwhelmingly White and Asian while the staff were overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. The men walking to Wall Street jobs were overwhelmingly white, the bums laying on the street begging them for change were overwhelmingly Black. The cops were largely white, the criminals largely black.
The difference might be subtle, just a few percentage points in reality, but it changes the feel significantly. The association of Black=poor=service industry poisons people. Atlanta is known for having a large Black middle and upper class. So that's where I would see the difference.
*And, necessarily, eventually no race at all thanks to assimilation. The amalgamation of the varied European immigrants into a more or less heterogenous "white" category in America resulted over time from a lack of economic discrimination between Italians, WASPs, Irish, Germans, etc. Jews being the major notable exception.
I've felt this, coming from a mediocre rural area in Greater Appalachia (where both the top and the bottom were white and the black people I knew were in similar circumstances to myself; they mostly lived in modest houses like my family did, not in trailers or mansions) to an old Southern port city. The racial inequality there was very in-your-face along with the juxtaposition of dilapidated shotgun shacks being all but adjacent to million dollar historic mansions. It was deeply jarring and remorse-inducing (as was witnessing the poverty of the Black Belt, a region depopulated by the Great Migrations and which is probably about as bad and forgotten about as native reservations or the worst that Appalachia has to offer).
By contrast, IMO successful integration happened mostly in the New South. It's still a little weird due to the fact that underclass blacks tend to live in inner city apartments while underclass whites tend to live in trailers out in the country but once you get above that level (and ignore the mostly white elite, which are as out of view to the middle as the underclass) you get working and middle class white and black people who interact and get along with each other well on a day to day basis and as /u/faceh puts it, there's more shared culture and experience papering things over than there is racial divide. We all want our kids to go to good schools and do well, we all want nice houses and fancy cars or trucks, we love Jesus (but are imperfect sinners), and want our football team of choice to win.
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I think it happens for a few reasons.
Car cities naturally separate out a lot of the interactions with the poors. So you just don’t see them.
Superstar cities have huge filters for intelligence
A lot of middle class left. So you only have the poors with free housing and the gap between them and the superstars is a lot more than middle class people elsewhere.
So big cities still have some 90 average IQ blacks but then wall st has 140 average IQ autistics. Much different than elsewhere where weaker filters in middle class Houston would nudge out lower IQ blacks and select for a little higher and the white populations superstars are gone.
I'll throw in a couple other theories:
-- Small predominantly white towns like mine simply never produce a predictive effect for being white. If I'm in, say, Japan I can figure that another white person is going to have more in common with me than the average person on the street. Hell, in Japan if I saw a Black guy in a Phillies hat we definitely have a ton in common by the Local average. At the PA farm show, shared skin color isn't predictive of anything in common at all, above the average of attendees. I've commented before on a similar phenomenon in my own life; due to high school class selection and selective college attendance, for a long time I was statistically more likely to have a lot in common with a random Asian kid my own age than a random white kid.
-- Southern towns benefit from a heritage of formal segregation. Segregation was morally bad and reflected negative attitudes, but it produced local Black elites and leaders in a way you didn't see in the North. This relates to the theory that the primary victims of affirmative action are Black communities. The talented tenth, the natural leaders, are plucked out of the projects and sent to Harvard and given make work diversity jobs at law firms and investment banks. This prevents them from going to HBCUs or starting businesses in their home neighborhoods.
Extremely salient point here.
Also here, and these are like inverses of each other but making the same argument.
When faced with an extremely conformist/homogeneous overculture, your choices are to adapt to conform as closely as you can and try not to stand out much... or carve out a subculture for yourself with others who share some degree of similarity to you and separate your identity as a group from the overculture.
Right now in the U.S., the overculture is the left-liberal cathedral.
For the post-civil war South, the overculture would have been 'white' culture, and enforced segregation prevented most blacks from assimilating, so as you say their only option was to form parallel institutions with black leaders arising to positions of prominence within that subculture.
And for better or worse, now the overculture not only allows assimilation, but it actively plucks the best and brightest of the undercultures so the undercultures are robbed of possible leaders and innovators.
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I'll second this, as someone who moved from Texas to Chicago the levels of racial segregation, and as you said even to the job level, is shocking. It is not an exageration to say that 90% of security roles are filled by black people, the majority of the people obviously sleeping on the sidewalk are black. It really does contribute to racial animosity.
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