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That has more to do with the number of poor people in a given area than it does race. It is just that blacks who are poor tend to live around other blacks who are poor whereas blacks, once the gain middle class status, tend to move into mostly white areas. There are some black middle class neighbourhoods and they are quite safe and well kept up from everything I have seen. But because there are so few of them- mainly because most middle class blacks move into white neighbourhoods- there is a perception that black neighbourhoods= crime which is not accurate.
Have any of you actually lived in a big city? One of the joys of living in LA was that I could work in the myriad small businesses finding cheap office space in "dangerous" south-central, take a walk along the beach boardwalk fronting houses of the wealthy mostly white folks in Venice and get some good pasta, head out to the Chinese enclaves in Azusa for cheap vegetables, and then come home to my cheap apartment in Little Guatemala.
Is San Francisco any less diverse because there's a clear line where the vegetable markets of Chinatown give way to the sidewalk cafes of Little Italy?
I don't see anything wrong with having various districts to a city. If I want a steamed bun in Boston, I know to head to Chinatown, while if I want an overpriced coffee or a gelato, I head to the North End. Racial integration is great for those who are comfortable with it. I'm used to being the 1% of my particular ethnicity wherever I live. But that doesn't have to be shoved down everybody's throat. Some people aren't comfortable with it. That doesn't make them bad people that should be forced to conform to some sort of homogenous monoculture any more than we should force Buddhists to be Christians or Muslims to be Jews, or Christians to be Athiests. People are how they are, and they aren't going to change no matter how much you shout and scream. Better we all just learn to deal with each other and let those who can't handle it move as far away from people they don't like (fairly or unfairly) as they want.
The reality is that instinct drives us to segregate ourselves and mistrust those who are not like us. If our cities look like a patchwork quilt of racial zones, so what?
I suggest that it's good enough we can live side-by-side in relative peace and harmony when compared with other places where racial groups violently butt up against each other. We don't all have to live on top of each other if we don't want to. If you ripped out the black, white, asian, or hispanic districts of any city, and replaced them with an even mix, you'd be tearing out a piece of that city's soul, in my opinion.
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