US versus them

I was thinking today about some other things I observed on my trip and one of them was how the only place I'd ever seen people getting their shoes shined at one of those stands was at Charlotte Douglas. And you know the best part? It was 06:30 and there was a line. People lined up to get their shoes shined dead early in the morning and at an airport. Guess folks in the South take their appearance very seriously!

On a more serious note, another thing I noticed involved race. Very roughly, what I saw of Charlotte was about half black, half white (don't quote me on numbers, but it seemed to be a very roughly equal split between the two [amongst other races]). There was no sign of racial tension that I saw, nothing. In fact, on the buses and streets, blacks and whites would talk to each other in the friendliest of ways.

But I did not see any groups of friends or acquaintances made up of both blacks and whites, just segregated groups.

Why is that?

I know that one day and a few parts of the city are a very small sample size, but to not see any integrated groups the whole day?? I can't for the life of me understand why that is! And I know that I speak from a very different point of view by living in Toronto and having multiracial integration simply be a fact of life, the way it is that our mayor is highly ill-suited for his job. But I honestly didn't expect to see the degree of segregation that I did in American cities.

It was like that in Portland and Seattle, too, but not quite as jarringly distinct. There was some mixing but again, for the most part, blacks and whites didn't form groups together.

A counterpoint was posed to me that maybe I should look at high schools and see what kinds of groups are there, that maybe there's more mixing in the halls of higher learning. To that, I replied that if adults form segregated groups, it's usually borne of the habits and friendships learned and made in high school, and that if I saw adults mixing racially I should expect to see that in teenagers, too.

I didn't.

And more than being puzzled and confused by this, I'm also taken aback because I'd have thought that by 2013 the vast majority of the population would be over the race thing and see each other as people, just as people; the initial conclusion (and please tell me of another one if there is) I've drawn is that they haven't and I just don't get that.