Last year, I had the great pleasure of seeing The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown's brilliant documentary film on Mobile, Alabama's storied, and segregated, Mardi Gras celebrations. Even now, long after the end of Jim Crow, the city's leading white families put together an elaborate series of Mardi Gras balls and parades under the auspices of the Mobile Carnival Association, and they name a royal court to preside over the festivities. Starting in 1938, a number of black families formed the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA) to do exactly the same. And so every year there is an MCA queen and a MAMGA queen, one white and one black, and Brown followed them both. As a native of Mobile, it is clear that Brown knows the terrain and the tangled history of both the city's Southern aristocracy and its black middle class. In the antebellum period, the ancestors of the MCA's grandees had literally enslaved the ancestors of at least one member of MAMGA's royal court, yet now they mingle, somewhat awkwardly, as equals.

I thought of The Order of Myths as I read about Attorney General Eric Holder's speech to his Justice Department on the scarring effects of race and racism. Holder very memorably called America "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race, and liberals and conservatives have reacted predictably, with the former calling Holder a bold truth-teller and the latter calling him, in effect, a nattering nabob of negativity. My sense--or rather, my hope--is that Holder has been misinterpreted, and that he was condemning the unwillingness of all Americans to speak frankly and openly about our persistent divides.

At the heart of Holder's remarks is a deep regret over the voluntary segregation that continues to define American life. Though it's hard not to read The Order of Myths as a critique of this kind of voluntary segregation, I came away from it with a sense of ambivalence. One can imagine the Mobile Carnival Association embracing a small handful of wealthy black families. Yet the middle and working class strivers who make MAMGA so extraordinary would inevitably be left out of any merely cosmetic integration--which is not unlike the cosmetic integration that makes our elite universities look like America while leaving racial inequality virtually untouched.

Institutions like MAMGA that bind communities together--that draw the upwardly mobile back to the old neighborhood--are rare. Min Zhou, a sociologist at UCLA, has noted that ethnic enclaves, like the Chinatowns and Little Indias that dot our cities, work differently from ghettos. Enclaves attract coethnics who've moved on to the suburbs as a place to do business or to worship. In contrast, anyone who can leave a ghetto does so as quickly as possible, sensing that there is little of value there. And so ghetto neighborhoods are steadily stripped of role models.

It is senseless to romanticize segregation, yet it is also hard to deny that something was lost when the black middle class left behind the entrenched black poor in neighborhoods across the country. In his scathing book Categorically Unequal, Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey describes the various mechanisms whereby racial inequality is reproduced despite antidiscrimination laws, ranging from the increasing geographic concentration of poverty in racial ghettos to the uneven impact of a highly punitive criminal justice system to the enduring importance of informal social networks. Black Americans are more likely to be poor than non-black Americans, and they are more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods. These neighborhoods tend to be more dangerous, and young men living in them will often adapt to this elevated level of threat by projecting a tough image--an image that has to be maintained through the use of aggressive language or even the occasional use of violence. Many of these young men wind up in prison, which erodes their earning power and thus their attractiveness as marriage partners. Worse still, high incarceration rates contribute to the spread of HIV in these already vulnerable communities. This is what we call a vicious cycle.

As Holder evocatively put it, "on Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago." Sunday evokes the continued separation of white from black churches. Saturday evokes the parallel private lives led by blacks and whites, even those who come from the same social class or who, as in The Order of Myths, are deeply dedicated to the same hometown. One striking fact is that metropolitan areas with a small college-educated black population tend to be far more integrated than those with a large college-educated black population. In the latter case, upper-middle-class black suburbs, which you might call "separate but affluent," tend to emerge over time. This could reflect a preference on the part of college-educated African Americans. It could also reflect a perverse unwillingness on the part of whites to live in neighborhoods that are seen as "too black." Most likely, the persistence of residential segregation reflects both tendencies, which are rooted in the same fear of interracial intimacy that accounts for the incredibly small number of black-white marriages. Holder was careful not to mention these intimate matters directly, which could reflect some cowardice on his part.

So what can government do? Fighting against poverty and the concentration of poverty is an obvious first step that should be embraced by the political right and left. Egalitarian liberals and evangelical conservatives have united against the broken criminal justice system, and there are many others where they can join forces. But when it comes to the fundamental question of interracial intimacy, there is very little government can or should do. It's far more important that each of us, as individuals, overcome our own racial cowardice.