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I think it happens for a few reasons.
Car cities naturally separate out a lot of the interactions with the poors. So you just don’t see them.
Superstar cities have huge filters for intelligence
A lot of middle class left. So you only have the poors with free housing and the gap between them and the superstars is a lot more than middle class people elsewhere.
So big cities still have some 90 average IQ blacks but then wall st has 140 average IQ autistics. Much different than elsewhere where weaker filters in middle class Houston would nudge out lower IQ blacks and select for a little higher and the white populations superstars are gone.
I'll throw in a couple other theories:
-- Small predominantly white towns like mine simply never produce a predictive effect for being white. If I'm in, say, Japan I can figure that another white person is going to have more in common with me than the average person on the street. Hell, in Japan if I saw a Black guy in a Phillies hat we definitely have a ton in common by the Local average. At the PA farm show, shared skin color isn't predictive of anything in common at all, above the average of attendees. I've commented before on a similar phenomenon in my own life; due to high school class selection and selective college attendance, for a long time I was statistically more likely to have a lot in common with a random Asian kid my own age than a random white kid.
-- Southern towns benefit from a heritage of formal segregation. Segregation was morally bad and reflected negative attitudes, but it produced local Black elites and leaders in a way you didn't see in the North. This relates to the theory that the primary victims of affirmative action are Black communities. The talented tenth, the natural leaders, are plucked out of the projects and sent to Harvard and given make work diversity jobs at law firms and investment banks. This prevents them from going to HBCUs or starting businesses in their home neighborhoods.
Extremely salient point here.
Also here, and these are like inverses of each other but making the same argument.
When faced with an extremely conformist/homogeneous overculture, your choices are to adapt to conform as closely as you can and try not to stand out much... or carve out a subculture for yourself with others who share some degree of similarity to you and separate your identity as a group from the overculture.
Right now in the U.S., the overculture is the left-liberal cathedral.
For the post-civil war South, the overculture would have been 'white' culture, and enforced segregation prevented most blacks from assimilating, so as you say their only option was to form parallel institutions with black leaders arising to positions of prominence within that subculture.
And for better or worse, now the overculture not only allows assimilation, but it actively plucks the best and brightest of the undercultures so the undercultures are robbed of possible leaders and innovators.
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