Greater than just the South, the eugenics movement in the US in the early 20th century, with forced sterilizations and criminalizing interracial marriage, happened nationally.
Though you don’t need to be capitalist to be racist as fuck. Racism exists all over the world in many different government and economic systems throughout all of human history
Indeed, Chicago, until the 1960’s, was one of the most segregated cities in the USA. Irish, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, etc…during daylight hours, everything was business, but during sunset, nobody crossed the ethnic and racial lines drawn up by the neighborhoods.
I am not sure, but I think Milton Friedman once revealed the depths of his ignorance about racial segregation in the US and that the claim that laws demanding all segregation be dismantled were a violation of the free market principle and that a true free market would dissolve segregation.
Chicago, as you mentioned, was used as an example to show just how dumb he was. Chicago had no official segregation policy. From a purely legal standpoint if an Irishman wanted to get an apartment in a black neighborhood and invite Italian friends over that would be a huge taboo and suffer reprecussions over it even if he wasn’t doing anything remotely illegal.
The only way it COULD have dismantled is to make law to strictly forbid that kind of discrimination on any grounds.
Australia heavily advertised multiculturalism and anti-racism during the '70s and '80s and then stopped. It seemed effective. We had one not very racist generation.
