I ride through racism every day on my way to work.
I live in West Hartford, you see, and in taking the bus to work, I know exactly where The Line is between Hartford and my town, because the bus starts to shudder as the road gets really crummy. Hartford city government budgets have been minimal ever since the money started to dry up in the mid-1960s.
What happened was twofold:
First, redlining, from the 1930s to the 1970s. The federal government gave banks maps of districts they designated as good loan risks and bad risks, with the bad ones in red...and the red ones were all districts full of black and brown people, where the green and blue ones were districts full of white people. Not by coincidence but design. The result was to dis-invest in the cities for the sake of moving the money out to the suburbs, and thus the great cities of the US were crippled by segregation.
And then, as if that wasn't enough, there were the interstate highways, whose effect on our cities is well illustrated by Hartford. They had Robert Moses come in to design an 8-lane elevated highway that would cut right through the downtown area, isolating the north end of the city -- full of black people -- from the rest, making vast swathes of land in the city useless, destroying thousands of homes and businesses, all so that the white suburbanites could zip through the city on their way to work, without ever needing to enter it.
So everyone who had any money was either incentivized to move to the suburbs, or was forced to because Hartford was turned from a great place into complete shit within twenty years. The tax base dried up, the municipal budgets dried up, the school system fell apart, there was nothing good left. You can see the remnants of what Hartford was in the big synagogues that are now churches. There's not a single active synagogue left in the city.
What was once a thriving multicultural city, a jewel of New England, has become a segregated land of concrete and gloom, where Main Street is nearly empty of pedestrians save for the bus passengers that make connections in the downtown hub. There is very little for any pedestrian to actually seek, besides their connecting bus.
But hey, come to my town! We've got all the swanky stuff that Hartford could have retained if a bunch of fucking morons hadn't decided it was a good idea to drive an interstate highway through the middle of downtown.