Racial diversity might make people feel warm and fuzzy about "race relations," but it's wrong to assume that living in diverse places means life gets better for people of color.

A new study of 1,504 Californians by USC Dornslife/Los Angeles Times is a sobering reminder of this. The results suggest that residents of California — an extremely racially diverse state — feel great about race relations there. But at the same time, they know the discrimination black and Latino people face, especially by police, is still a huge problem.

The lesson: as the United States moves toward becoming a "majority-minority" nation (in which people who identify as something other than white are predicted to outnumber people who identify as white by about 2044), it's important to manage expectations and seriously question the belief that different ethnic groups living near each other — and even getting along with each other, for the most part — means racism will die out.

A lot of people associate diversity with improved race relations

"California is the most demographically diverse community in the history of the planet Earth," Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll and executive director of the Unruh Institute of Politics of USC, told LA Weekly.

According to the most recent US Census, the state's population is 39 percent white, 38 percent Latino, 14 percent Asian, 7 percent black, and 2 percent Native American (including some who identify with more than one racial group).

The people the pollsters talked to were well aware of their community's diversity, with most saying their neighborhoods were at least somewhat diverse and almost a third reporting that they lived in "very diverse" areas.

There was a dominant view that this diversity was a good thing. The majority said it had a positive influence on their communities, and most said race relations in the state were at least "stable" or "improving," with nearly 75 percent saying things were "excellent" or "good" in their neighborhoods.

And according to LA Weekly, a large majority — 65 percent of white voters, 61 percent of Latin American [Latino] voters, 60 percent of African-American voters, and 79 percent of Asian-American voters — believed race relations were better in California than in other parts of the country.

"When you know your neighbor and have more diverse communities, which California does, it becomes much harder to discriminate against other people," pollster Dave Kanevsky of American Viewpoint, the Republican firm on the bipartisan polling team, told the LA Times.

Kanevesky's take is something you hear a lot — and it's no surprise that it's often stated as fact. President Barack Obama echoed it in a February interview with Vox. He admitted that he worried a lot about "the immediate consequences of mistrust between police and minority communities" but said he was optimistic generally about this issue, and about racial polarization in politics. Why? Because of the country

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read full article at source: http://www.vox.com/2015/4/20/8445003/race-relations-diversity-racism