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There's a lot of reasons but I'll focus on a crude materialist explanation; Industrialized societies are are less zero sum than agricultural societies. Agricultural societies under malthusian conditions are very zero sum. Any land that your group isn't farming is a limit on the population of your group. If you look at the Free Soil Party in the United States, the concern of Midwestern whites about slavery is not that it is unjust oppression. It's that white plantation owners are going to use black labor to take land in the west that could go to white yeomen farmers (it's not just that but that is part of it).
Some of the earliest anti-discrimination measures(Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee) come out of world War II and the need to utilize black labor in the American defense industry. When the pressures to be efficient get turned up you can't afford a luxury belief like segregation. Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.
There are some places where there is really intense zero sum competition in industrialized societies. Unions had a complicated history with segregation I don't have time to get into here. But overall in an industrial society there's a lot of mutual benefit in economic growth and moving people from picking cotton in a feudal system to making steel in some of the world's most efficient factories is a good way to increase growth.
South Africa is the one society that kept segregation intact through industrialization and whites there are obviously in a different position from other anglo colonies in being the minority of the population.
This seems to presuppose that segregation is always a net negative, which doesn't seem warranted to me.
Contingent on some hypothetical populations themselves being a net negative, doesn't it seem likely that integration could itself carry enormous costs?
I suppose there are hypothetical populations of uniformly idiotic demon spawn where that would be the case. In really existing America early desegregation of industry took place to increase defense production not because of widespread adoption of egalitarian views. In general reallocating labor from agriculture to industry was a winning strategy in the 20th century and segregation was an impediment to this reallocation of labor.
If you think that markets are generally better at allocating labor than governments then you might predict that de jure segregation would generally have high costs.
You have a point here -- my distrust of integration lies rather in that I don't expect the market to be allowed to sort things out.
EDIT: To be clear, integration plus forced (at gunpoint) 'equity' is just directionally toward Harrison Bergeron and I think we can agree there are major costs there.
Yes, I'd like (actual) equality under the law and the market and individuals and communities to be allowed to find their own level, and for those who sink to not be massively subsidized by those who swim. Compassion, I think, does not extend to perpetuating dysfunction.
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