> What are the qualities we would want and not want in a neighbor?
Ah, but that's exactly the problem. There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".
Ah, but that's exactly the problem. There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".
I agree about the "same values" part, but I think the "same race" part is more dubious.
I've witnessed first-hand conservative non-Hispanic white Americans getting along very well with conservative Hispanic Americans, and conservative Asian Americans – and while that is just anecdote, I'm not aware of any hard data to contradict it – most of the time, the shared outlook on political/religious/moral/etc issues ends up being much more significant than the racial/ethnic/linguistic differences. I don't have the same anecdotal experience to draw on when it comes to conservative African Americans, but I'd be surprised if it was greatly different in that case.
My impression is that in a lot of these discussions, when people say “race”, they really mean “class”: most middle class people don’t want to live right next door to the lower-lower class, and an ethnoracial majority lower-lower class person is really no more attractive a neighbour than a minority one; meanwhile, most of them (even most conservatives) would be perfectly happy to have an ethnoracial minority neighbour who is of a similar wealth, education and views/outlook/attitudes/politics/ideology/etc
Heck, in my experience as a brown guy traveling in some pretty conservative parts of the country, even most of the “race” stuff boils down to “values and culture.”