Our thinking was that the "least racist" city would be a place that obviously would have fewer people expressing outwardly super racist views, and wouldn't be exceptionally residentially segregated, which would eliminate most older midwestern cities. It would also be a city that didn't pursue polices that outwardly and disproportionately harmed minorities (i.e, discriminatory policing, housing, education, etc). That rules out....well, basically everybody, but some places more than others.
My guess is that nationwide, the least racist place would be somewhere out west. I think the most racist cities I've lived were Chicago and New Orleans, and the least would be either Sacramento or Washington D.C (which is SUPER DISCRIMINATORY in other ways, like money).
What do you think? Who would be the LEAST racist city? How would we measure it?
I think it's a good idea to take into account residential and by extension school segregation, access to city services (i.e. for the longest time in Atlanta, white neighborhoods had several times the number of hospital beds per resident than black neighborhoods, same thing with school capacity), etc.
A big question I would have here is whether you would count a city that does not have any significant racial minorities (call it diversity or exposure). My parents told me a story about an incident that happened when they lived in New Hampshire, and there were only two black families in town. The newspaper published their addresses and apparently people drove by to see them, it was like a zoo. They were likely statistically indistinguishable from their neighbors and that incident, to their recollection, did not result in anyone getting attacked. But even if nothing like that happened, that's still a bit uncomfortable and intimidating for the families, right?
The map is probably warped in some way and not really true, but... my other guess was going to be Honolulu. Random guess, really, otherwise I just have no idea.
Japanese-White-Native racism? Gentrification? I know nothing about Honolulu.
Oh there is that, simmering. I only visit Hawaii for vacation--frequently--so I only have a surface level understanding of it but there is sort of an atmosphere of an "uneasy truce" lying below the surface. You're right of course that lack of any black population doesn't mean racism in some other form isn't a problem, I guess I just focus on that since our particular flavor of white/black racial history is one of the more uniquely American...umm... quirks.
Never been there, but I figure a place like Hawaii would probably be high on the list given how integrated the population has been for such a long time (i.e. percentage of mixed race people, make love not war). From the one Hawaiian I know, the thing they hate the most are all the tourists. It's just an anecdote, though, don't take it for more than it's worth.
I've read that proximity and familiarity reduce racism on an individual level, but of course many of our most diverse cities are actually very segregated on a neighborhood level. I know Boston is like that. It is, or is close to becoming, a "majority minority" city. If you take the subway during rush hour, you'll hear Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Hindi, Haitian Creole, and Brazilian Portuguese, and yet a lot of those people will be coming from neighborhoods or suburbs that are not well integrated.
As far as Boston goes, it depends heavily on where you are talking about. In Boston proper and the southern residential neighborhoods, it is still strongly
de facto segregated. Part of Dorchester is a little Saigon, there's a Chinatown, there are Irish- and Italian-descended neighborhoods where you still hear a strong Boston accent, and so on. A contributing factor to this is the land values, particularly in the Back Bay and North End, so that is at play as well.
But if you go off the north side to, say, the People's Republic of Cambridge, you'll find a heavily integrated and gentrifying neighborhood. I'd argue the biggest individual factor is the universities (prominently Harvard and MIT, but there are at least a dozen nearby) and their ripple effects. Cambridge used to be a poorer industrial town, but a lot of startup tech companies and medical research labs (particularly Novartis, also Pfizer) are opening, Google apparently has an office here now, etc. But there is also a slew of recently-constructed mixed income housing units, and the social services have been retained (which you don't always see in these situations) and frankly been strengthened by the new tax revenue. I know this one street where there is a homeless shelter, grad student housing, an industrial warehouse, some labs, a gay bar, and a small nuclear reactor in about a 5 minute walk. Of course, this all raises tension between the long term residents and the yuppies and race plays a bit into that. But anecdotally (as above, take it for what it's worth), I see mixing at the bars and street festivals that brings those halves together.
From the police perspective, I haven't heard any really bad stories about Boston cops recently, although you don't have to go too far back to find them. I think there has been a bit of a honeymoon period after the marathon bombings, since the police handled that situation well.
