Survey Says: Most White People Don't Have Any Non-White Friends

A new study shows three quarters of white people don't have any non-white friends.

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Complex Original

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The trailer for the upcoming Dear White People declared the "minimum requirement of black friends in order to not seem racist has just been raised to two." Face it, the "token Black friend" is an all too familiar reality and now there's some studies to prove that things may be far worse than we thought. 

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Robert Jones 3 out of 4 white people don’t have any non-white friends. This was a glaring difference when compared to black people whose friends include 8% of white people.

The PRRI created a chart that illustrates the friend demographics between whites and blacks. 

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Some factors that were said to affect the demographic numbers included population numbers, as white people account for more of the U.S. population.

This study would be alarming at any rate, but is especially troubling given the current weight that has been placed on race over unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown’s death and the subsequent treatment of the people in Ferguson.

Jones mentioned how this study relates to Ferguson and the divide between white and blacks, which was only deepened given its mostly lily-white authority figures. 

He concludes that white people aren’t able to understand things like the complicated relationship between black communities and their police forces (see above) because white people aren’t “socially positioned”—since 75% of them don’t have black friends and all.

This is what we call the root of the problem.

[Washington Post]

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