People actually are free to associate as a Constitutional right in this country. Government force aggravated rather than helped historic racial segregation. The correct response in hindsight would have been to remove the force and allow society to adapt as the people themselves saw fit. That was not the course taken, the course taken was to force the issue and render certain associations no longer free, which bizarrely was just the inverse of the Jim Crow laws rightly condemned. If making legal distinctions on the basis of race is wrong, it’s wrong. MLK knew this, why don’t you?
Now, we have bizarre, counterintuitive and costly efforts that amount to nothing more than a hill of beans, beans that are assiduously counted by an army of apparatchiks bound and determined to make the numbers look pretty for whatever obscure reason might be deemed a priority at any given time. That is not how people live, work or play. People associate for many reasons, common interests, religion, family, geography, class and yes, even race. There is nothing inherently wrong with this in a putatively free society, and your faux intellectual superiority is exactly what has been behind every instance of wrong based upon race in my lifetime.
Drop the force of law in this matter, accept equality under the law in deed as well as word and allow the people to live, work and play as they so choose. If segregation rematerializes in private interactions under the resulting, truly free and open society, any honest individual should see that as the desireable result freely chosen by those with the Constitutional right to do so, and won’t immediately jump on some gilded high horse to interfere because of a presumed superior knowledge as to how any individual or group of individuals *should* be conducting their affairs.