Only 8% of white American high-schoolers have a best friend of another race. (For blacks, it’s about 15%.)
Uhm, yeah and? If 99 out of a 100 people are white and 1 is black, which percentage of white people will have a black best friend, assuming random assignment of friends? 1%! And the black guy will have 100% of his friends of different race.
The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships.
Did they control for income level? Because low income coincides with violence and gang formation. Your child income level will not change if you talk to them about race before 3rd grade.
What looks like racism is likely just (poor understanding of) statistics.
> The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all except in cases where "diverse" means "has a large population of one other racial group than white". I grew up in a tremendously diverse area of the country, the local university is one of the top5 most diverse schools in the country. Almost none of my friends were of my race, and almost none of their friends were their race either. I would expect than in a classroom of 30 kids, 15-20 countries or nationalities could be easily represented. My little gang of school friends represented nearly every continent on the planet, one kid was from Japan, one kid was mixed Japanese/American, one kid was African (from Ghana if I remember), two brothers were Cypriot, another friend was Mexican and another one was Salvadorian. Most of the kids on my school bus didn't even speak each other's native tongue.
Diverse means "diverse" not "bi-polar". It's really easy to separate into like-racial social groups when you have two large groups of different races vs. lots of small groups of many races.
It makes sense to me. I went to both a high school and a college where there were sizable minority groups.
To be clear, I ended up making friends with a diverse group. But I would often get strange looks for not sitting with other members of my own race (asian) in my classes.
What I noticed was that, if the minority populations are large enough, there is no incentive to really inner mingle among races.
At my college, you would see fraternities where there were clear race lines, so there would be a white fraternity, an asian fraternity, hispanic, etc.
Conversely, there is a university in a nearby city where the minority groups are much smaller so minorities don't have the luxury of clustering together into separate groups. So I saw more people with more cross-race relationships.
My fraternity was predominantly white, but not by design. It just worked out that way.
I recall we once pledged a guy named Jose, a very cool guy who happened to be Hispanic. We were really happy to have him. But the local fraternity that specialized in Hispanics continually harassed him until he couldn't see any solution but to drop out of our pledge class.
If 99 out of a 100 people are white and 1 is black, which percentage of white people will have a black best friend, assuming random assignment of friends? 1%!
The term "best friend" is ambiguous in the article, but I suspect they mean something like "the child's top 3 best friends." The 8% figure would actually be shockingly high to me if it referred to the number of white kids who would name a kid of another race as their very best friend, given the fact that people of the same race tend to be clustered geographically.
The statistic was given earlier by the NurtureShock authors in this Newsweek blog post, but the use of the phrase "best friend" is equally ambiguous there, and they don't cite a source, instead moving on to talk about a different study:
Perhaps the problem is pretending that everyone is the same. The kids aren't stupid, they can see this isn't true, and they're bound to fill that vacuum with whatever else they can pick up.
I'd think that the better strategy would be to embrace the difference. Recognize that races and cultures really do have different qualities. But because the mixture is so complex, and the world that we apply those qualities within is also so chaotic, that it's quite impossible to say that, in the final reckoning, any one is superior to another.
The better strategy is to explicitly acknowledge observable differences - skin colour, accent, etc. - and point out that those things don't tell us what kind of person someone is.
One of my favorite examples here is that a good portion of African-descended people have a resistance to malaria, which is certainly relevant to ones life in tropical climes. And on the other hand, those same people are susceptible to sickle-cell anemia.
The ability to digest lactose comes from a genetic mutation that's been traced down to northern Europe; most other people don't handle dairy well (sorry, don't have a handy reference). This may not be a big deal, except to the person having diarrhea because his friend assumed that everyone's digestion works the same.
Differing climate and lifestyles has led to physical characteristics differing in lung capacity, amount and distribution of musculature, etc.
[Edit: my characterization below of Chomsky's position is backwards, he opposed this idea]
Noam Chomsky posited that, much like computer languages, the language that a person speaks influences the way he thinks, and more recent research tends to support this. As a result, some people are better equipped mentally for different tasks. For example, there's a group in New Zealand that has no "relative direction" words like "left" and "right"; instead, all of their directional communications are in absolutes ("North", "West", etc.). Somehow they are far better than others at maintaining a sense of direction, so for any task that requires such a sense, these may be the best candidates.
It's probably not mere chance nor prejudice that some groups are better or worse represented in professional sports. For whatever reason, there's a preponderance of Africans and paucity of Asians in American football. I find it hard to believe that football coaches are being racist when there are such huge amounts of money on the line.
People really aren't all the same. We have differences, and in many cases those differences are shared within demographic groups. Why do we want to pretend that this isn't true, rather than reveling in special opportunities that it affords all of us?
Addendum: I realized that I partly answered based on culture (language) rather than race, as you asked. This points to a bigger question: what is race? Are the peoples of southern Europe separate from the northeners? Archaologists generally believe that American Indians are descended from Asians crossing the Bering Straits; should we view these as the same race, or separate? I'm not trying to be provocative, I really don't know how to define this.
I sort of tackled the "what is race" question in another comment. [1] I kinda agree with you on culture is important, but I find that generalizations there fall flat, as subcultures within a culture tend to contradict each other. In all cases, the fundamental fallacy of bias comes from using attributes associated with some group to make decisions about an individual, who may or may not share those attributes. Our brains attempt to create heuristics for us, we have to actively work to supplant them with logic.
I'll now proceed to go off on a tangent from something that's already just barely topical for HN...
Our brains attempt to create heuristics for us, we have to actively work to supplant them with logic.
I generally agree with this. The benefits of civilization make most of these heuristics unnecessary, and more of a liability. But I wish that people advocating this would see its application in further areas.
In his The Fatal Conceit, Hayek talks about how our evolution within small tribes gave us the instinct to be compassionate with others, but that in today's wide world, that instinct just can't scale far enough. This is another area where we need to reject the emotional reactions that are pre-programmed into our brains, and think more rationally about whether what the little voice says really makes sense.
Anybody interested by this, I strongly recommend reading Bronson's "NutureShock," the book on which this article draws.
The book is not a polemic about race. Rather, it examines a lot of interesting research regarding how children learn. Other chapters cover how to use praise effectively, the uses and abuses of intelligence tests, and how kids learn to lie.
"The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships."
That ought to prompt some reconsideration of social policy. The studies would refer mostly to compulsory attendance public schools, and maybe the first thing to do is to change school financing mechanisms so that more schools are open to all comers on a voluntary enrollment basis. This works for my son's online "school," which is both racially diverse and full of students who have friends from other races. (But it sets my teeth on edge to refer to people as belonging to one race or another, as my own family is multiracial, so every one of us surely has various friends of a "different" race whoever our friends are.)
Link to FAQs and discussion about how race plays out as an admission factor in United States colleges:
I was about to post that the "fact" is at least an oversimplification. At the edge cases, it is logically false. A school where everyone is the same, there can be no cross-race friendships, and in a class where everyone is different, there can only be cross-race friendships.
Of course, the deeper lesson here is that race itself is a concept invented by racists. Race does not exist, except in the mind of the racists and those upon whom they exercise their beliefs. If you don't believe that, ask yourself whether you call people Asian, as if the huge proportion of people from the most populous continent on Earth share some fundamental attributes based on the geographic location of their ancestors that are worth distinguishing. Ask yourself if there is some proportion of ancestry that you use to distinguish one race from another- it's a very racist exercise to do this.
There's no simple category that defines the race of my own children. Everyone is miscellaneous.
A school where everyone is the same, there can be no cross-race friendships
I appreciate your reply. I did a forehead smack on myself when I realized I had missed the obvious exception to your edge case the first two times I read your reply. A school pupil can form friendships OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, irrespective of where the pupil goes to school. And that happens. Sometimes it is easier to form friendships outside of school than inside school. (I lived in one place just more than one year, spanning parts of two school years, in my youth, and the best friends I had there were neighbors or friends from my Scout troop. I liked some of my classmates quite well, but I made friends more rapidly and more deeply in non-school settings. And this, by the way, is why I emphasized "voluntary enrollment" above, because young people make friends better in voluntary rather than compulsory activities, and is also why I was unafraid to homeschool my children. My children have always had friends--and friends from many "races" at that--but they have never attended school (except university-based classes for my oldest during his last few years of secondary education).
Race does not exist, except in the mind of the racists and those upon whom they exercise their beliefs.
Fully agreed with you here. When I see those annoying forms that ask my "race," I write in "human." I prefer the designation "human," but I can live with the designation "postracial" if need be.
Of course, the deeper lesson here is that race itself is a concept invented by racists.
Thank you. Although your wording may be a slightly more confrontational than I would have put it (that "race" is purely cultural), you raise a very important point.
The word itself has become impossibly overloaded, meaning a poorly defined combination of genetics, national/cultural origin, and current culture. I remember marveling at the admonition on a user's social network page: (paraphrased) "I'm Hispanic, not Asian!"
What I find important to note is that the spectrum of meaning of "race" ranges from something an individual has no control over, to something that is pure choice. Although discrimination based on genetics being wrong is something that's relatively uncontroversial, discrimination based on choices/behavior is much less clear cut.
If you don't believe that, ask yourself whether you call people Asian, as if the huge proportion of people from the most populous continent on Earth share some fundamental attributes based on the geographic location of their ancestors that are worth distinguishing. Ask yourself if there is some proportion of ancestry that you use to distinguish one race from another...
Agreed. After the last presidential elections, I was always a bit frustrated when Barack Obama was hailed as the first "African-American" President. It's not clear to me what this really means in the first place. But by any logical definition, I can't see how to label him as "African-American". Isn't he every bit as much caucasian?
"That ought to prompt some reconsideration of social policy."
You should check out the book The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's a really quick read, and I think you'd like it. Here is the first chapter as a PDF:
As for reconsidering social policy, the government has basically known about this since the Coleman report was issued in 1966. But they've (mainly the Democrats) been covering up their own research since the day it was released, so it's not likely that change will happen any time soon.
I would appreciate if you posted some links on home schooling... things a noob parent needs to know.
The open enrollment (assuming you mean what I inferred) has not worked well in my home town.
About 15 years ago, the city and county schools allowed you to pick your school. There is a fee of around $300 per year to go to a school outside your district. It only took a few years for the schools to polarize along racial lines. When I went to the city high school in the mid-80s, it was a 50/50 split racially and was considered the best school around by far.
My son will start kindergarten this fall. Which school will I send him to? The North-West county school, which is widely understood to have the best teachers, management, and facilities. The children at this school are mostly white from the highest income brackets, and more likely to have a parent that spends more time with their child (income related). I do not like that the school will be off balance in regards to race, but all the schools are off balance now.
It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong
Our assumptions, which have no evidential basis but we adopted anyway on pure faith because they sound nice and make us feel good about ourselves, are wrong? Say it ain't so!
Well, to be fair, the ultimate goal is for everybody to ignore it, right? That is pretty much the definition of the end of racism. Stands to reason that ignoring it in front of your kids could teach them the same, but perhaps a more active approach turns out to be better.
That may be the goal of some. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think that's wrong.
The fact is that we're all different, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anything.
The problem is when we assume that differences in a few attributes makes us better or worse than others, or more or less deserving of [respect, entitlements, etc.].
We're all different. There are so many variables that interplay in so many ways, and they are realized in such chaotic circumstances that it's impossible to assess superiority (except maybe in the most pathological cases).
Uhm, yeah and? If 99 out of a 100 people are white and 1 is black, which percentage of white people will have a black best friend, assuming random assignment of friends? 1%! And the black guy will have 100% of his friends of different race.
The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form cross-race friendships.
Did they control for income level? Because low income coincides with violence and gang formation. Your child income level will not change if you talk to them about race before 3rd grade.
What looks like racism is likely just (poor understanding of) statistics.