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As a person of color, I agree that I felt much, much safer wandering around in the lily white towns of Idaho (I just got a few odd stares) than I did in the ghettos of Oakland. I feel the safest, however, in my very ethnically diverse (whites only make up about 65 percent of the population) but upper middle class suburb.
Being a person of color and being Black aren't always the same thing.
I am white in a black neighborhood and I live around 'my own kind'.
I don't care about skin color. My street is 60/40 white black, it's meaningless to me. I have great neighbors, they are friendly and helpful and and. That is 'my own kind'.
I went to the hospital and came home desperately searching for my cat, out of my mind with worry, as my bestie couldn't find him the whole time, only the other cat was eating from her porch.
I walk past a neighbor's unit and hear MEOW from the window. He took him in while I was gone. Does it matter that he is black or white? That was great. We are not friends. At all. In fact we had words when he was running for the board. But he took my cat in anyway.
That is my kinda people. I would do the same in reverse.
It all depends on where you are the kind of people you are around. When you're around decent people, race really doesn't matter. It sounds like you have alot of good people around you.
At least in NJ, it has to do with "good schools." People pay a premium for "good schools," which prices out poorer people. There's a lot of rotten middle class suburban kids who are on drugs, etc but the learning/social environments in the school systems and neighborhoods aren't perceived as deleterious as the inner-city. Most middle class parents (of any race/ethnicity) want a wholesome environment for their kids to grow up in and will pay a premium for that. If you want this to change, you'd have to figure out how to fix the issues of generational poverty that plagues the inner-city and creates deleterious learning/social environments.
I've read far-left rants about how this isn't fair and more or less amounts to parental ownership of their kids, but their solution seems to be completely re-engineering society and turning children into the wards of the State. I personally don't know any hipster millennials who'd want to send their kids to an inner-city school, but the idea somehow seems to be somewhat en vogue... perhaps for the sake of virtue signaling.
This is just the plain truth of the matter. If you don't like it, raise a family in the inner-city and send your kids to those public schools and get like-minded people to do the same for the sake of desegregation. The most you'll achieve is kickstarting/accelerating gentrification. Or you could advocate for school vouchers and partially decouple geography and schools.
Here is why I left the city and moved to a semi rural area.
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. A great little blue collar community. Our graduating class was close to 700 people, and our school was in the top 5 in the state. For the most part, there were no issues in the community, if there was a theft, it was someones pedal bike or a lawn mower. I graduated and moved to a community right next door, which was just a bit more "upscale" since it bordered a lake. Through the years, things started to change. Detroit ended the mandate that any public worker had to live within the city. Prior to that , it was like a large ring around the city that was comprised of LEO's, FD, etc. Then all the communities adopted school of choice. Then a few years later the housing crash happened. Homes that were once $175k were now $60k.
The high school where I graduated, now has a Niche grade of C- and the graduating classes are around 180.
Now using the C-D crime index, the first community I lived in had a violent crime index of 260, which at that time was lower than the US average. Now it is 396, while the national average is 207. It maxed in 2013 at 481.
The community I just left still is pretty decent. C-D crime index is 127 which is quite a bit less than the national index. Things were changing there though, and I felt our home value had reached the highest it would be after the crash. So we sold 6 months ago. And took advantage of the low interest rates.
We now live in a semi rural area, and the violent crime index is 41 and the schools are rated a B+. And I feel our home value is going to do nothing but increase, while the community we lived in will probably stagnate.
I'm not blaming this on any one thing. There were a lot of factors on why the communities surrounding Detroit have changed.
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