Integration vs Cultural Autonomy

So I'm really annoyed lately with the way this conversation is going between my Urban Poverty teacher (white female) and I both outside of and during class. We are talking about the concentration of poverty and racial segragation. To her, the only two solutions is to either move people with higher income into the low income neighborhoods and/or move poor folx into the high income suburbs. The whole conversation seems to be centered around the fact that brown and black folx living in their own communities is a bad idea. Of course she uses numbers to show that places that have been integrated have had higher employment rates and better academic achievement than when they were in racially segregated neighborhoods. What's my beef?

This issue as I see it is that communities of color are constantly targeted for budget cuts and cutbacks in services, historically. It is the LACK OF RESOURCES and economic marginalization that causes concentrated poverty, not "too many black/brown folx in one neighborhood." I make the argument that integration produces cultural genocide as the assimilation and removal acts did for American Indians. Same shit. I see it happen, comming from Harlem. Gentrification: move the white yuppies in and the character of the community changes, the grocery store that had collard greens closed down, platanoes cost more and you have to go further to do grocery shoppin, you get looks for kickin it on your own stoop on hot summer days, all the mom and pop spots that have been trying to survive are wiped out ect. ect.. So of course if you live in a "white" neighborhood and go to a "white" school and become assimilated to speaking "white" and thinking "white" you're gonna become successful in a white-value dominated society...(of course though they wont let too many non-white whites get too many crumbs). What the numbers DON'T tell you is the cultural affect of moving into a white suburb or having your neighborhood gentrified... Who's perspective are we looking at when we say that integration has been "successful"? My nephews who relocated into Orlando don't speak a lick of spanish and eat microwaved macaroni and cheese more often than rice and beans. I don't get to see them often and I haven't had a chance to be a part of their lives. How can moving people away from their homes be a good thing if it separates families and weakens community ties? Why should we buy into the american-way individualistic way of living? Should we not have the choice to live in healthy communities of our own? Call me a separatist, sure, but there's nothing about being a separatist that means we can't work in solidarity with other groups who share a common history, so there ain't nothing wrong with being one. My point though is that our cultural autonomy is being challenged with conversations about "culture of poverty" or more like victim blaming instead of looking at the structural flaws.

So what do other folx think? Integration or Cultural Autonomy/Separatism
Should we not decide within our own communities how economics should function, what kind of schooling our youngsters recieve, what kinds of employment will be available to us (meaningful shit, like entreprenuerial work, culturally appropriate and mind stimulating work, not factory or copymachine housekeeping corporate work), how the physical structure of our communities should fit our lifestyles, and what kinds of policies will benefit us most?