When you live in cities, especially coastal cities, you're exposed to people from all over the world. There is still a lot of prejudice, but despite whatever amount of that there is, for the most part people simply have to deal with people who are different from them all their lives. But in places where there are mostly just people with the same race and religion, people can get away with carrying strong distrust, anger and fear about 'the other' without being confronted by it every day. This sort of isolationism is a threat to the American ideal, especially when things get hard for people and they now use 'the other' as a scapegoat to blame. This is all pretty human though, not just American. What's unique about us is that as a nation we've embraced at least the ideal of a melting pot. So we keep slowly self-correcting in that direction.
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