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Notes -
My comment doesn't really address your question, and is more about the weird bubble that Americans seem to live in. The white people who live in all the apartment buildings near me make me think of The Wire more than any non-white racial group I've encountered in the country.
In my midsized Canadian hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, we don't really see a lot of direct racial segregation, so poor people are just whoever was here 100 years ago and gradually got dragged down to the bottom rungs of the ladder. The kinds of behaviours that people tend to apply to poor black people in the US so obviously apply to mostly white people in Canada because our cities don't seem to have a group of people who were herded in to specific areas and then continually oppressed with real estate and zoning. (Very much with the exception of indigenous Canadians who were royally screwed and herded in to small areas and continually screwed with by locals the government). I'm not an expert, but our "bad parts of town" tend to just be the old industrial areas that got wiped out thanks to globalization, rather than an area with any kind of racial homogeneity beyond "generic white Canadian"
I feel (I don't have good data to base this off of) that many of the Americanisms like racial segregation, long term outcomes of segregation, or your strange healthcare system are like water to fishes; it's impossible to see that you're wet and that there might be a world outside. This makes a lot of racial politics that get exported from the US feel strange here.
Why does my perspective matter? Hmm... I think there is a tendency for conversations about race to want to make sweeping claims about people with the DNA for darker skin, when my experiences in my hometown, and bigger and smaller cities in Canada are so tilted away from the idea that a single genetic population displays meaningful differences.
Also, I want to push back a bit on the idea that any meaningful universal things about people with dark skin can be acquired by looking at the population of black people in the US... but also, I don't want this to come across as pandering anti-racism or something...
For what it's worth, I (the OP) am Canadian as well and live within an hour of Hamilton (not the Greater Toronto Area, though). And also for what it's worth, I definitely do notice in my home city a racial difference in the sort of behavior I mentioned. It's probably not as stark as might be observed in the US, but it's certainly obvious to me.
Ok that's fair :) I think I'm confusing the magnitude. There are no other racial tendencies I do see, just not as stark as the US.
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