Obviously living in a diverse neighborhood works for you. More power. But it doesn't work for everybody. Many people prefer to live around people that look like them. It's not my job to pass judgment on people for where they decide to live. If this woman wants to live around other white people, I don't really care. Just as I don't care if a Somali immigrant decides to settle in Minneapolis, and Iraqi Christian in Dearborn, or a black family in Atlanta.

I'm glad you told this story because it's a perfect example of the bind white liberals are in when it comes to race. Many white liberals secretly think the same way your neighbor does. Believe me, I've known plenty who do. But they can't say it, especially around other liberals. Saying what your neighbor did would be an automatic tombstore here, for example.

New Evidence That Racism Isn't 'Natural'

In a paper that will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Eva Telzer of UCLA and three other researchers report that they've performed these amygdala studies--which had previously been done on adults--on children. And they found something interesting: the racial sensitivity of the amygdala doesn't kick in until around age 14.

What's more: once it kicks in, it doesn't kick in equally for everybody. The more racially diverse your peer group, the less strong the amygdala effect. At really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared entirely. The authors of the study write that ''these findings suggest that neural biases to race are not innate and that race is a social construction, learned over time.''

...

But all of this is almost beside the point anyway, because there have always been plenty of reasons to believe that the amygdala response doesn't reflect an instinctive aversion to the racial "other." For example: The amygdala's response to African-American faces had been observed not just in European-American adults but in African-American adults--who aren't, in this case, the "other." Apparently whatever cultural information was inculcating a particular response to blacks in whites was having a similar effect in blacks.

...

But when it comes to defining this enemy--defining the "out group"--people are very flexible. The out group can be defined by its language, its religion, its skin color, its jersey color. (And jersey color can trump skin color--just watch a brawl between one racially integrated sports team and another.) It all depends on which group we consider (rightly or wrongly) in some sense threatening to our interests.

It's in this sense that race is a "social construct." It's not a category that's inherently correlated with our patterns of fear or mistrust or hatred, though, obviously, it can become one. So it's within our power to construct a society in which race isn't a meaningful construct.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/new-evidence-that-racism-isnt-natural/263785/