Re: integration-- every single American city is de facto segregated. Even some of the most census-diverse cities in the country are set up in ways so that people of different races almost never mix. The US developed an entirely alternate kind of transportation based on the personal car once trains and other forms of public transportation were integrated by law. The only places where you really see much racial diversity are in places that have been integrated by law. Even then, those institutions that are de jure integrated do everything that they can to work the system (e.g. hiring/admitting seven black women for every black man).
When a game does the United Colors of Benetton thing, they are trying to reflect the propaganda of the system rather than what that system actually produces.
Not my experience. Maybe I just live in a much more diverse area (I live in Texas, where no one etnicity is a majority), but I currently, and always have, had people of different ethnicities in all the neighborhoods I have lived in, schools I have gone to, and workplaces I have worked at. One major reason I always roll my eyes at all the "race war now!" type folks on the codex. Somehow the places I have lived my entire life have managed to withstand diversity without breaking out into violent racial conflict, and even managed to be some of the best places to live and work in the country with massive growth.
And it certainly isn't because it is forced.
While there are plenty of places where there isn't much diversity due to one ethnic group being a very strong majority, there are many places where that isn't true as well as I have visited other parts of the country that clearly had a fairly diverse group of people walking around and interacting. It is also a very big country, so I wouldn't assume whatever personal experience you have had (or read about) are the norm across the country.
I think the extreme diversity often seen in fantasy games just doesn't make a lot of sense though, unless there is a very specific reason for it. People generally can't travel as easily in fantasy settings as they can in modern days, so there just wouldn't be that much traveling around and settling down different places. An area on the boundary between two different cultures might have a fair amount of mixing/interaction between the two (although after a period of time there will be a merging of the two cultures), and same thing with would happen in an area that was recently invaded or conquered.
But half a dozen different cultures all co-existing in the same place? You better have a very good explanation for that.
There's literally a Harvard study that shows the more diverse a community, the less close people are. People stay in more and interact less. They want to interact less. But let's trust your gay little anecdotal evidence.
I was in the military and most of my time blacks hung together, at lunch together, went out to together. Yeah I was cool with some of them and we worked together fine but most people's closest friends were their own race
I was also in the military, one of those diverse workplaces I worked at. That was also where I learned that my experience, growing up around lots of people with different ethnicities, was not the same experience everyone had. In basic one of the Drill Sergeants specifically had people who had grown up never seeing a person of another race until they got to basic raise their hands, and there were several. That was the point he was trying to show us. That we were going to have to learn to interact very closely with people who came from different backgrounds and had very different experiences that we did.
And your inability to make friends with people besides your own race sounds like more of a personal problem. There are certainly people that aren't that comfortable making close friends with people outside their background (and whose background is very ethnic specific) but you are, like most people, viewing things through the lens of your own beliefs and background.
But it is very easy for someone who has a dim view of diversity and other races to focus on and see cases where there is conflict and separation, while it is easier for someone like me (where a pretty diverse environment was always the norm) to see where people are not having issues with that.
Black people do tend to be a bit more like this and cliquish, and that is mostly to the way black people are taught while growing up that other ethnicities, specifically white people, are out to get them or are going to otherwise oppress them or take advantage of them, so they have to stick together. It isn't true and it creates somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy as it actually causes black people to tend to be more racist on average than the average American. But that also just demonstrates it is very much a learned behavior.
Despite what racist people do like to claim, people forming in-group/out-group preferences based primarily on ethnicity is not the natural way of things. You see it commonly in history, but studies have shown that economic class and interests are actually much significant motivators for in-group/out-group preferences.
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