

Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us/08roommate.html

======
seldo
This isn't too surprising to me. In the world of gay rights, it's well-known
that the biggest predictor of having positive attitudes to gay people is
knowing at least one gay person. People debate about whether this is cause or
effect (do you like gay people because you know one, or do you know gay people
because you like them?). This puts some weight behind the argument that
familiarity breeds tolerance, which has always seemed intuitively true to me.

~~~
grandalf
Interesting point. I think people who are gay should come out to as many
people as possible for this reason :)

~~~
lsb
Please note that this didn't work for Harvey Milk, for Alan Turing, for
Matthew Shepard, and for many others.

~~~
gruseom
Milk and Turing, especially Turing, were from different eras than ours. It's a
lot more dangerous before the paradigm shift (and boy has this paradigm
shifted). Shepard's case, from what I've read, was a lot more ambiguous.

Edit: I'm not arguing that there's no more anti-gay violence, just that the
social context has changed radically. The aftermath of the recent incident in
Fort Worth will be interesting to follow in this respect.

~~~
didip
Times hasn't changed much, minority of all kinds always need to assert their
equal rights.

Once gays are accepted into the mainstream, there will be other, oppressed,
even more niche minority group.

This is the nature of our pyramid-like society. There will always be oppressor
and oppressed.

~~~
jacobolus
I think this is a counter-productive attitude. The difference in the US
between the 1850s (blacks in slavery, many women in abusive relationships with
no legal protection or recourse because they were considered property, chinese
and mexicans used as cheap labor but discriminated against mercilessly, gays
all in the closet because their lives would be at risk if they came out,
etc.), and the 1950s (gays nearly all closeted still, women’s lib movement not
yet off the ground, Jim Crow and frequent lynchings, many top universities
hardly accepting anyone not a WASP male, rampant discrimination in housing,
hiring, politics, the mentally disabled brutally institutionalized against
their will, and the physically disabled not guaranteed equal access to public
infrastructure and instututions, etc.) and today is dramatic, and the trend is
_overwhelmingly_ obvious.

Sure, we still have problems with racism and sexism, and groups like
transpeople and undocumented Mexican laborers are sometimes treated despicably
by our society and its institutions, and we never managed to ratify the ERA,
and various groups are still stigmatized and held back from various positions
of power, so we shouldn’t stop the fight for justice and equality, especially
equality under the law, but you can’t wave away all of the progress we’ve made
with “Times hasn’t changed much.... This is the nature of our pyramid-like
society.” That kind of defeatist attitude is not just sloppy reasoning but
also damn poor public policy.

Shit, we have a black president, a female secretary of state and speaker of
the house, numerous high-level officials and corporate execs and prominent
ministers, etc. who are openly gay, a soon-to-be Latina supreme court justice,
etc. Times have most definitely changed, and the changes run deep.

------
byrneseyeview
Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this would also be true in a
world in which racists are correct. That's still a world in which college
graduates would generally have college graduate roommates, people who wanted
to live in hip neighborhoods would have roommates who wanted the same, and
people who liked to get wasted and listen to loud music would live with folks
who had the same tastes.

It's easy to imagine this applying to age. If an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old
share an apartment, it's probably because the 18-year-old is willing to be
quiet after 10 PM, not smoke pot in the house, etc. Or because the 40-year-old
is tolerant of late night noise and weed. However, the 18- or 40-year-old
doesn't see it that way; to him, that 22-year age difference has surprisingly
little impact on behavior.

 _However_ , the this-is-compatible-with-racism viewpoint can be disproven by
either a) assigning people random roommates (no, not _random roommates who all
got roughly the same SAT scores, want to live in the same state, etc._ ), or
b) seeing if there's a selection process that affects whether people pick
roommates of one ethnicity based on how closely they stereotypically match the
behaviors of another.

------
ojbyrne
In college I had a black roommate who was addicted to funk & hip-hop, and at
the time I was heavily into punk & hardcore. By the end of the year our
musical tastes had switched hosts, so to speak.

~~~
mahmud
You are ignoring the aesthetic and cultural overlaps between the four genres
and their constant crossovers. I wont mention NuMetal, which sucks, but seek
out some of the funky punk stuff that, usually, comes out of London -- you
might even hear some ska nuggs in the mix :-)

~~~
ojbyrne
This was the eighties, it was probably less obvious (and we were both probably
somewhat sheltered). Suffice to say we introduced each other to a different
culture, which I think was the point of the article.

------
mynameishere
Also, wealthy people who keep servants think that Hispanics are congenitally
soft-spoken and obedient.

We can't discard the importance of random samples just because we want the
world to correspond to our existing mindsets. Take the same stupid college
kids, plant them in the middle of Detroit and see what happens to their levels
of "prejudice".

------
anigbrowl
Hollywood has an entire genre known as the 'buddy movie' based on this
phenomenon. Two or more people from opposite sides of the tracks are forced by
circumstances to team up; respect and friendship follow.

Oh well, Captain Obvious saves the day once more.

------
makecheck
The irony of any statistics regarding race, etc. is that the very act of
analysis is itself a form of unnecessary segregation.

For example, during the election I saw CNN blabbing about each candidate's
popularity among white women voters or black voters or this or that, and I
just turned it off. The whole problem is that people treat these as relevant
and appropriate categories. The statistics should be completely uninteresting,
in a color-blind world.

~~~
philwelch
The problem is, the statistics are very interesting just because we do live in
a non-colorblind world. We're never going to live in any kind of idealized
fantasy world where race and sex are irrelevant, so pretending that they are
is ignorant of reality.

~~~
makecheck
If there's a flaw in democracy, it's that people can use any criteria they
want to vote. :) If people ignore all logic and vote entirely based on a
candidate's name or color, there's really nothing stopping them.

But what would _discourage_ such shallow thinking, is a media that sets a good
example. If newscasters' generalizations are closer to the best interests of
voters (e.g. "popularity among people in <profession>"), it may have a
positive effect on attitudes in society.

~~~
philwelch
The media's job isn't to "set an example", it's to report things as they are.
As things are, people vote differently based upon sex and race, because they
have different experiences and viewpoints and stations in life due to sex and
race.

Even when all the candidates are white males, black people tend to vote for
the white male that supports affirmative action and civil rights over the
white male who does not.

~~~
didip
Since most media companies is run as for-profit, I would say that selling
stories that sells is in their best interest as opposed to reporting things as
they are.

Telling stories about black vs white candidates/voters are too profitable to
passed up.

~~~
philwelch
Be that as it may, the objective thing to do is still to report differences
between voting populations based upon race and sex, because those differences
do actually exist.

------
tokenadult
My comment from another online that I have FAQified because the issue comes up
from time to time:

I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older
than most people who post on HN. I distinctly remember the day that President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood
for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and
other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his
name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who
moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his
early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan
violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"),
including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of
terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in
which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion,
unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where
I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement,
including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination,
with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and
blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her
summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how
she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas
cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at
night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights
activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained
acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member
of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who
was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC)
affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means
active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those
days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as
some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other
people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current
controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-
American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor,
"What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was,
"I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent
question really got me thinking.

So to me, the astounding thing about today is that people still regard "race"
categories at all. I agree that the trend line in the United States is for
people to get along better in general, but we still have painfully far to go
to get the categories out of our brains and meet new individuals as
individuals.

------
aston
I'd love to see the results of a similar study done at a school like MIT where
self-segregation in living groups is not only allowed but encouraged. On the
plus side, by letting students form living situations they're comfortable
with, you remove a lot of domestic strife from their lives. At the same time
you reduce the overall diversity in a living group.

As an alum, I really want to believe that the self-segregation is a net win,
but this article suggests that that may not be the case...

~~~
Scriptor
As a former MIT applicant this is actually news to me considering I ended up
going to a school where I mostly don't see any self-segregation. What exactly
goes on there?

I have a problem with your argument though, how does encouraging segregation
reduce domestic strife? You're assuming that simply being with another group
would immediately cause hostilities. Even if it does remove strife, college is
only 4 years! It hardly seems worth it to avoid some discomfort you will
likely face more and more in the future.

~~~
philwelch
People do not usually share a bedroom with anyone they are not having sex with
after college. Dorms are a rather unusual situation in that respect.

Even sharing an apartment with people you don't get on with can be a problem
in terms of generating conflict. Roommate stress (especially for introverted
conflict-avoidant people like me) is only a negative thing in the context of
being a serious student. It's an essential thing to avoid.

~~~
kragen
_People do not usually share a bedroom with anyone they are not having sex
with after college._

Your experience of the world appears to be very limited. If I had to guess,
I'd guess you'd never lived anywhere poor.

~~~
philwelch
You're right, but the intersection between that population and the population
of university graduates is, I'd imagine, fairly low. And there are differences
in race relations across the spectrum of economic classes.

------
amichail
Isn't this a racist statement? "...but those who roomed with Asian-Americans,
the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more
prejudiced themselves."

~~~
nostrademons
It's factual. They phrased it as "scored the highest on measures of
prejudice...", not "most racist..."

I wouldn't be surprised if it's true as well. For a minority group, Asian-
Americans can be surprisingly racist.

~~~
dkarl
_For a minority group, Asian-Americans can be surprisingly racist._

Especially against each other. Nothing like telling your Korean friend how
much you enjoy visiting Japan and watching Miyazaki and Juzo Itami's movies to
stir up some good old-fashioned hatred. "They raped my grandmother. They're
not human. They don't have souls." And then you have to pretend to like Oldboy
to calm them down.

~~~
nostrademons
Against themselves too. My friend started a FaceBook group called "Ambivalent
Asians - for all the self-hating Orientals out there". (He is half-Chinese and
half-Japanese, so perhaps he just got both heapings of racism mixed up in the
same person...)

------
carterschonwald
I think an important caveat is that if you're stuck with bad roommates,
tolerance of anything related to those roommates will decrease

------
lionhearted
Taking lovers from other places and ethnic groups takes prejudices way down
too. Lying in bed together, half delirious, you can talk about all those
things that are taboo to bring up about in polite conversation. That way, you
actually learn more about a culture's unique traits and idiosyncrasies where
most people would be embarrassed to ask about those things to someone they
know more casually.

------
amichail
Perhaps a good way to reduce prejudice is to always exchange resumes when
meeting people for the first time -- even in non-work related contexts?

