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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?
As I say, I don't think ending segregation was per se the problem.
Well, terminating segregation in the US seems to have been more a symptom than a cause of the disease which is now killing us, so I don't think that it'd have made much of a difference. Perhaps, as a step on the road, it would have been better to delay it longer? But it was already inevitable by that point. And who knows, maybe keeping it around longer would actually have antagonized the leninists into going even farther even faster.
But if I lived in one of the communities destroyed by integration, I think a pro-segregation position would be obvious. If I'd lost social cohesion, property, and possibly even loved ones. I don't live in such a community, because I'm blessed to be able to live in a community with almost none of that sort of problem. It's expensive, but hey, segregation is. Revealed preferences would seem to indicate that everyone who can afford it finds the price tag worthwhile.
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