I have heard that living in a racially integrated neighborhood (or going to RI schools or working in a RI workplace) will cause someone to distrust people of different races even more so.
It seems like it would be the opposite. The more you interact with people, the more likely you would get “used to them” and discover that stereotypes are false.
If this isn’t really the case, then why?
Presumably because each race would still stick with it’s own kind. Any negative interactions would reinforce negative stereotypes.
Because the stereotypes aren’t false. Black people really do listen to rap music. White people really do go camping. Asians really do study hard and do well in math. Stereotypes don’t get dispelled; they get confirmed.
With enough numbers, kids will band together using the most easily identifiable characteristic. Once there is a group, they become “they” - as in “they are always doing that.”
With only a few, there is no “they”, there is Bob, or Sally, or John. Harder to make your judgement statements when you don’t have enough people to group together and slam.
Due to confirmation bias. You don’t see the black family who lives peacefully down the block; you do see the rowdy black teenagers making a scene at the gas station trying to buy alcohol. Confirmation bias being what it is, you likely skip over the group of white kids making a scene too, while you know your family is a bunch of law-abiding citizens. (This is all a general you, not directed as Chessic.)
Is there really proof that living in a diverse community will make one more racist? Or are you just repeating what you’ve heard?
Po Bronson discusses the research in the book Nurture Shock. Here is a column by him discussing the topic:
The book site (and link to his columns):
It could very well be that white people who live in diverse communities do so because they can’t afford other places to live, and income could be correlated with racism. Which is not to say that the latter statement is true, but it’s one possibility.
I think it may result in more overt raciscm, but actually reduces the depth of the racism through contact. So called ‘inter-racial’ relationships increase in diverse communities, while segregation strengthens the perception of stereotypical differences.
Even when ‘race’ is removed from the argument, cultural differences still exist. People who see other people as members of groups will tend to have group biases.
Just a few observed behavior patterns:
Privileged recent college grads who have never had exposure outside of typical upper middle class American suburbia giggling over racist jokes. Not jokes that have humerous attributes if you changed the categories, instead jokes that simply degrade other people. Then they said this was a nostalgic thing about their high school days. So maybe their way of coping with the onslaught of reality following college was to look fondly on the times when they considered themselves superior to some sub-human others. Great, what a future.
An older woman lived her life in a poor urban area and spoke the basic predjudices of her peers. When I commented that I considered people individually and disregarded stereotypes, she admitted that her daughter married a Puerto Rican man, and he was fine husband. She seemed to use racist language as a social meme, but as I learned more about her, found her to be more open-minded than she sounded.
An assisted living facility where the some in the group that ate meals at the second serving had disparaging comments about the type of people who ate at the first serving. One hour between meal times was the only difference I could identify between the groups. So draw a line anywhere, and somebody will see it as an ‘us or them’ situation.
Here in RI (Rhode Island, reading the OP was messing with my pattern matching), there are numerous groups, often segregated to some degree, in a small area. We have distinct groups of (using their terms), Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Black, Canucks, Swamp Yankees, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, Indians (American), and more I’m sure. And within these groups there are demarcations, for the Portuguese, 1st or 2nd generation, Portugal or the islands, Warwick or Cranston. And between and within the groups there is no shortage of people who complain about others being biased towards them, with no hesitation in expressing their bias against some other group. Yet people call me an asshole (Ok, I am one, but at least I don’t do that).
A guy I work with has a very dark face, almost alone among a group of otherwise very diverse people. He doesn’t attend many social events, not because of any sign of prejudice I’ve seen on his part, I think he just feels uncomfortable being noticeably different in appearance, and also culturally unique.
So I don’t know what this all adds up to. I think it’s obvious that the ‘us vs. them’ mentality is at the heart of all prejudicial behavior, and gets reinforced by those who find rationalizations for it, but what to do about is a tough call. I do what I can by not playing the game, and letting people know I’m not shy about pointing these things out. If anything else works, I’m all for it.
In my opinion, bigotry needs a ready target to flourish.
There was a recent thread about why anti-semitism has been so common in western society. And many people (including myself) raised the point that part of the reason was that Jews were conveniently around to be the target of hatred. Christians might have theoretically hated Muslims or Hindus but they were thousands of miles away.
I grew up in rural New England, which is essentially the least diverse part of America. There were virtually no blacks or hispanics or asians where I grew up. And racism really wasn’t an issue. I’m not saying we were particularly enlightened - it’s just that without any black people around there really wasn’t any point in being racist.
It’s like when you read about the Balkans and hear how the Albanians hate the Macedonians and the Magyars hate the Wallachians and the Serbs hate the Croats. But outside of the Balkans, these feelings are nonexistent. If some Czech asked the average American how he feels about the Slovaks, he wouldn’t have a positive or negative opinion to offer. The average American is indifferent over these groups.
I am black. I can’t stand rap music and may go camping for Christmas.
Assuming it’s true, I’d think of it as a variation on “familiarity breeds contempt.”
It’s easy to imagine yourself broad-minded and tolerant and inclusive and yadda yadda when you haven’t been faced with people who do things entirely differently than you, or at least not a lot of them that you can easily throw together under convenient labels.
Stereotypes are not false. They don’t apply to every member of a group of course, but there are enough blacks who do drugs and steal, jews who are greedy, whites who feel superior because they’re white, etc. that the stereotype will be confirmed. After all, someone who gets robbed by a black guy probably isn’t thinking ‘gee, most black people I have met are alright. It is a shame that particular person is engaged in such anti-social activities’.
I don’t think it’s racially integrated neighborhoods, as much as racial integrated neighborhoods where wealth and social status are divided along roughly racial lines.
I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood that was almost 100% lower-middle to working class poor. There was very little racism. We were all living side-by-side, in the same conditions, facing the same prospects. We all played as little kids together. Racism wouldn’t have made sense.
I think where you get the racism is when you have a school where the kids on the bad side of the tracks all happen to be pretty much of one race while the kids who are pretty well off happen to be pretty much of another. The tensions that these inequalities create break out on racial lines.
Picture a high school with two richer suburban middle schools and two poorer black inner-city schools feeding into it. New freshmen are going to graviate towards their old middle school friends from their neighborhoods, and soon the school is going to end up looking pretty divided. When you factor in who has the nice stuff and who doesn’t, those divisions are going to take on an ugly element.
I think community attitudes about respecting other cultures is a major factor. When the people in an ethnically diverse area treat each other with respect and consideration and do not try to inflict their culture on members of another culture, friendships can develop and people learn about their similiarities and may even come to appreciate their differences. However when one group tries to dominate the others, the minority groups quickly start to hate.
The Newsweek column does not support the OP’s premise. I don’t think Bronson does either. What he’s discussing is the Contact Hypothesis and how it doesn’t seem to apply to elementary and high schools, although he makes a point of mentioning that there are a lack of studies done on younger children. The article is basically why he doesn’t think the same things that work in colleges and the military can be applied to younger students because they fail to meet the four conditions of the Contact Hypothesis. Note that in the article he specifically mentions how people in college show a decrease in racism after repeated exposure to other groups. What Bronson is saying is that the ways we reduce racism and other prejudices in adults don’t necessarily translate directly into ways to reduce it in children.
If the community is one where everyone is in tight competion with each other (say a very limited number of jobs available) then the Contact Hypothesis doesn’t apply and you’d probably see a rise in racism. Where the Contact Hypothesis does apply there is a reduction in racism and other prejudices. Merely living in a diverse community isn’t going to increase racism, while at the same time just living there isn’t going to make you a better person. What a diverse community will do is provide more chances that the conditions of the Contact Hypothesis will occur making it far more likely that prejudices against “the other” decrease.
I think that this fails on several points. First, I suspect that there is more ethnic separation among poor people than among wealthier people. (I have no studies to prove this, but my memories is poor neighborhoods or communities have rarely been integrated, regardless of which group lived there. It might be different in New York sized cities, but places like Metro Detroit and Metro Cleveland frequently get cited as among the “most segregated” metropolitan areas and the places with the least integration tend to be decidedly blue collar. (I seem to have heard similar things about Chicago, but I am not going to look it up.)) In contrast, a number of upscale, (not exactly wealthy), cities are quite diverse, (E.g., Shaker Heights, OH).
I am not equating income with racism, simply noting that it is not forced diversity that would be behind it.
= = =
Your examples of confirmation bias have nothing to do with the veracity of stereotypes. The stereotypes probably ARE false, and just because a few people happen to match them hardly makes them less false.
= = =
As to the OP, I doubt that there is any general rule about diversity promotiong racism. More likely, in some cases, a person with latent prejudices will find them confirmed in a situation where he or she is constantly in contact with people of the suspect groups and one will encounter more such people in a diverse group than if one’s contacts are limited to one’s own “type” of person.
From my experience, a person living in a non-diverse neighborhood which becomes diverse might become more obviously racist because there are more opportunities for it and because they feel they are losing something. But I’ve seen the same effect when a social class of the same race moves in - for instance richer people in a gentrification process, or students moving into a neighborhood.
I’d be interested in statistics about young children growing up. I’d suspect there would be a lot less there.
I think that even sven’s onto something with the race and income divides aligning along the same lines.
I grew up in southwest Houston, Alief if you want to get specific. I’d challenge you to find a more diverse area- the predominant ethnicities were white, black, hispanic and Vietnamese. However, we also had significant populations of Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese.
I don’t remember race being the least bit of an issue- it wasn’t even something that we considered.
After high school and college, when I was out on my own, I didn’t end up living in such diverse areas, and started noticing that say… black people were DIFFERENT. As in, listened to different music, had very different attitudes, and stuff like that. It was kind of a shock when I reflected on it, but it made sense. As kids, there wasn’t so much social class stuff- we were all kids. As adults, there was/is a fair income disparity.
My current neighborhood is an interesting example- it’s a bunch of 40 or so year old homes near a lot of lower-income apartments with a significant section 8 presence. The people break down VERY clearly by income and race if you go to the grocery store- you just don’t really see poor white people or middle-class black people around here. I can see how this could reinforce stereotypes if you didn’t continually challenge yourself. If the only young black men you see have really baggy pants falling off their asses, are wearing bling and have grills, you develop a certain opinion. Same goes for them- if the only white people you see are the ones who can afford a house inside 635 in Dallas, you’ll have a skewed view of white people as well.
It’s kind of hard for me- I don’t want to stereotype people, but I think it must be a natural reaction. Luckily, there are quite a few middle class black folks here at work who I get along with famously and who tend to break those stereotypes on a daily basis.
I strongly suspect that it’s often EASIER to idealize other ethnic/religious groups, and blithely tell yourself “Everybody is really the same, deep down” when you don’t actually interact with them.
To meet and interact with people of different ethnic/religious groups CAN shatter our negative stereotypes… but it can also shatter naive beliefs that our differences are superficial and unimportant, and can create brand new negative stereotypes.
A rich white kid who’s grown up in a lily-white neighborhood has probably been bombarded by the “Let’s sing Kumbaya and hold hands, because people are all the same everywhere you go” approach to race relations all her life. If she ever moves to the city, she may well be shocked to find out that, no, everybody ISN’T the same, and that people have all kinds of attitudes and beliefs that could puzzle or even horrify her.