On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

In a wider context you are probably correct, but it's worth pointing out that the urban areas in the South are pretty damn progressive.

There are reasons homogeneous communities form in the U.S. A few of those reasons have to do with city planning and legislation. City planning can be racist in nature and promote exclusionary communities. Redlining, while not typically state legislation, is a good example of practices that contributed to the formation of primarily white communities.

You mention people making distinctions based on where you go to work, where your kids go to school, what kind of car you drive, how you dress, etc.. If I'm black and couldn't afford college for various reasons, I'm going to have a hard time getting a job that would allow me to buy the kind of car, dress in the clothes, send my kid to the schools, buy a house where the other people who had a _systematically_ easier go at life would.

My point is; When people think of those who are in and outside of their community there is latent racism. Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.

> I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us."

The genetic basis for delineating "races" is sketchy at best. The cultural aspects are as important as skin color to the definition of race, which is why either the first or second definition of "race" in any reasonable dictionary refers to all these things aside from "melanin content".

So at some point, segregating oneself from people who worship differently, go to different schools, play different sports, ... -- especially in communities where many of these divisions are inspired by geography distributions that were intentionally created along racial lines less than a century ago -- is more than just "unhappy coincidence".

But let's set that aside for a moment and take your assertion as fact.

> This puts the Midwest in a really hard place because just about any white person can claim (truthfully) they are not being racist. Yet, the outcome of the collective actions of all of them end up with a pretty strong divide that is mostly along racial lines.

Indeed. Sometimes, the consequences of aggregate social behavior are more important than individual intent. (Actually, I'd argue almost always.)

A community in which wealth is disproportionately divided along racial lines is a racist community, even if no one in that community harbors individual and purely racially motivated prejudice.

> Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this?

Teach people how to think dispassionately about systems.

I'm not sure that there is a way to fix this without switching from a "nominally typed" definition of racism to a "structurally typed" definition of racism.

Such a definition already exists. And by happy coincidence, the programming analogy works especially well because this notion is already called "structural racism".

> So it seems like it is an impossible situation.

At least for the current generation, for whom anything short of direct and violent prejudice on the basis of a few phenotypes is the only thinkable definition of racism, and for whom "racist" is a stinging moral and personal indict rather than a statement of fact about an emergent phenomenon that may or may not have anything to do with the content of any particular individual's character.