This the most unexceptional, unoriginal wrong talking point that always comes up in these conversations. I've heard it my entire life growing up in the south, and it constantly betrays the OP's actual experiences when dealing with this matter.
It's a southern apology. And a really dumb one at that, fueled by a bitter "us vs. them" mentality ripe everywhere in the south.
There is absolutely no data point supporting this position. Not one. People who live in cities and metro areas are consistently significantly less racist than people who grow up in homogeneous communities, especially compounded if that community is a rural one. What fits both of those criteria? Generally the south.
I'd be hesitant to dismiss this outright. While urban areas don't have as strong a history of explicit racism, a lot of implicit racism takes hold when the percentage of the black population is just too low to encounter blacks in everyday life. You compare "cities and metros" against "homogeneous communities" as though cities and metros are necessarily non-homogeneous. This is not the case. Plenty of cities on the west coast are nearly entirely while. Even moreso if you count white + one other race like Hispanic or Asian. While the latter does offer some kind of non-homogeneity it's still the case that in many cities in liberal states most people go about their working lives without any black coworkers on their team.
This the most unexceptional, unoriginal wrong talking point that always comes up in these conversations. I've heard it my entire life growing up in the south, and it constantly betrays the OP's actual experiences when dealing with this matter.
It's a southern apology. And a really dumb one at that, fueled by a bitter "us vs. them" mentality ripe everywhere in the south.
There is absolutely no data point supporting this position. Not one. People who live in cities and metro areas are consistently significantly less racist than people who grow up in homogeneous communities, especially compounded if that community is a rural one. What fits both of those criteria? Generally the south.