A necessary conversation: Part II

Freshman year, in more ways than one, is an opportunity to branch out and meet new people.

At the end of my last article, I commented on Harvard Professor Robert Putnam’s finding that people who live in diverse communities tend to trust people of all races less than people who live in more homogenous communities, and then asked what this finding means for Duke. Given that Duke is highly diverse in many ways, except economically, it seems that our University would be a perfect example of the sort of racially balkanized community Putnam predicts. But are we?

In some ways we are not, the reason being a phenomenon that only really exists in the military and on college campuses: random interracial roommate pairings. But there is also evidence to suggest that we might be, because of our racially divided greek system.

Putnam analyzed communities in which people, given certain economic constraints, could choose where to live, and they often chose to live in fairly homogenous neighborhoods within larger, racially diverse metropolitan areas. While people in these cities may interact with others of different races, they rarely live together.

At Duke, particularly during freshman year, the opposite is true. People of different races are often randomly assigned to live with one another. And living with a person of another race has substantially different effects than simply interacting with him or her.

Several studies have found that interracial roommate pairings can reduce prejudice and diversify friendships, according to an article written by New York Times education reporter Tamar Lewin. Yet those same studies found that “such relationships are more stressful and more likely to break up than same-race pairings.” Lewin’s summary of the evidence suggests that living with a person of another race is a difficult but worthwhile experience.

Contrary to Putnam’s finding, it seems that contact theory—the idea that interacting with a person of a different race can reduce prejudice—is true when that contact is sustained and personal. But this sort of contact, common during freshman year, tends to diminish over time, according to the 2009 Duke study (PDF) “Interracial Friendships in the Transition to College: Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together Once They Leave the Nest?”

The study corroborated the findings of earlier research that having a roommate of a different race diversifies friendships in ways that extracurricular activities and classroom interaction do not. Interestingly, people who lived in singles had more diverse friend groups than those who lived with same-race roommates, presumably because they lived in diverse dorms and had to forge their own friendships without relying on the social network of their same-race roommate.

The study, which used Duke as its data set, is all the more interesting because it statistically demonstrates that white freshman who join predominantly white fraternities and sororities have less diverse friend groups than their white peers who don’t go greek.

The researchers found that white students entered Duke with fewer friends of different racial backgrounds than Asian, black or Latino students, with only 10.6 percent of their pre-college friends being of a different race. This is not necessarily surprising because white students matriculating to Duke come primarily from  neighborhoods and high schools with high percentages of whites, on average. By the spring, the white students’ friend groups had diversified to include 16.2 percent of people of a different race, which the study partially attributes to random interracial roommate pairings.

 In contrast, black students enter Duke with far more friends from different racial backgrounds—39.9 percent—but have fewer friends of different races, 31.1 percent at the year’s end. The authors of the study accredit this to the fact that many black students matriculate to Duke from schools without large black populations and arrive on campus interested in making more black friends.  

Rates of interracial friendship for Asian and Latino students did not change substantially.

The study also found that, at the end of the first year, the primary indicator of the diversity of white freshmen’s friend groups is whether or not they joined a fraternity or sorority.

“White students who join fraternities and sororities experience no significant increase in the proportion of their interracial friendships, while those who do not ‘go greek’ significantly increase their proportion of their interracial friendships over the first year of college,” write the authors of the study.

Greek involvement for blacks did not have a significant impact on first-year friendships because historically black fraternities and sororities provide the option of rushing sophomore year.

What this study suggests, then, is a statistical basis for the idea that the greek system inhibits white students from making friends with people of different races. But this is not due to some nefarious desire of whites in Greek organizations to not make friends with minorities, but because there are few minorities in their social networks. Social environment, rather than racial preference, seems to drive how people make friends.

So, freshmen, if you are lucky enough to live with someone of a different race, seize the opportunity to get to know them well if you don’t already, because with every passing year it gets more difficult.

Yousef AbuGharbieh is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.

•••