Hardly any of my friends are black.. [View all]

[HipChick]

I do believe that part of the healing process for America is for folks to step out of their comfort zones of needing to be around folks that look like them. Otherwise the cancer that eats at away at America called racism will continue to undermine this country...Racism will continue to rear it's head, until there is some sense of all people being treated equal..


"All my black friends have a bunch of white friends. And all my white friends have one black friend."

That's the memorable punchline of a Chris Rock bit from 2009 on interracial friendships. And according to some recent number-crunching by Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, there's a good deal of truth to that statement.

Let's consider the average American white American and the average American black American, and let's say, for simplicity's sake, that each of them have 100 friends. If you were to break down their respective friend networks by race, they would look something like this.

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In a 100-friend scenario, the average white person has 91 white friends; one each of black, Latino, Asian, mixed race, and other races; and three friends of unknown race. The average black person, on the other hand, has 83 black friends, eight white friends, two Latino friends, zero Asian friends, three mixed race friends, one other race friend, and four friends of unknown race.

Going back to Chris Rock's point, the average black person's friend network is 8 percent white, but the average white person's network is only 1 percent black. To put it another way: Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.

Another factor is our tendency to seek out and associate with people who are similar to us in any number of ways - religiously, politically, economically and yes, racially too. The polite term for this phenomenon is "sorting," and it impacts everything from political polarization to income inequality to the racial differences in friend networks seen above.

As PRRI's Robert Jones writes in The Atlantic, Americans' segregated social circles have influenced responses to the events in Ferguson, Missouri over the past few weeks. Polls show deep divides between blacks and whites on everything from the role of race in Ferguson to the appropriateness of responses by protestors and police.
The numbers above offer insight into why so many whites have expressed bafflement over protesters' responses to the shooting of Michael Brown. The history between many black communities and the police forces that serve them is long, complicated, often violent, and characterized by an extreme imbalance of power. But as Robert Jones notes, most whites are not "socially positioned" to understand this history, simply because they know few people who've experienced it.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/25/three-quarters-of-whites-dont-have-any-non-white-friends/?wpisrc=nl-wnkpm&wpmm=1