I am just curious what kind of thinking is behind this contradiction i.e. why it seems ok for some to work with people of diffrent ethnicity but not to live with them. Any insights?
Wojtek
^^^^^ CB: Yep. There's a famous American question. Would you want your ( white) daughter to marry one of them ? This seems to be the main barrier to residential integration. And residential segregation is a main pillar of US racism.
See also the whole history of the myth of Black man as rapist and murderer of white women ( when in the main, of course, it was white masters and men raping Black women, in fact). Angela Davis discusses the myth of the Black rapist in _Women, Race and Class_.
Underpinning this structurally is the American "one drop" rule for defining race. One "drop" of Black blood makes someone Black. So, interracial reproduction would tend to wipe out the white "race".
One place White fear of race mixing is explored in a book titled _The Isis Papers_ , by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing. It raises some interesting issues.
http://aalbc.com/authors/frances.htm
This "suburban legendary/mythological" question added an interesting, subtle, side light to the Iowa majority vote for Obama , since his mother was white.