Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us/08roommate.html

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

24 40 17 years ago

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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 :-)

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

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.

seldo• 17 years ago

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.

grandalf3• 17 years ago

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

lsb2• 17 years ago

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

philwelch7• 17 years ago

Except it's not the life mission of every gay person in the world to fix everyone's prejudices about gay people. It's exceptional and brave when someone does (not that it's exceptional and brave to come out of the closet, but it's exceptional and brave to go around fixing other people's bigotry).

lsb2• 17 years ago

Quite true, and some of the Songkickers I knew in London said that Ryanair and Easyjet (two low-cost airlines) contributed immensely to European integration.

That said, as a homo I found the Onion's article Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years all-too-disappointingly funny. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28491

aston2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

philwelch7• 17 years ago

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.

aston2• 17 years ago

The dorms at MIT all have a very strong cultural component (Do you like German culture? Do you like pyrotechnics? Do you want to avoid living with guys?) As an incoming freshman you're able to rank the dorms you'd like to live in, and you're placed into one of them by a lottery weighted by everyone's rankings. Once placed within a dorm, there's a further step of in-house rush which allows even further self-segregation, as within each dorm there're still more specific identities. The net effect is that most everyone lives with people like them (or at least people they like and vice versa).

Given the pretty heavy strain placed on you academically, it's in the school's best interest to reduce stress anywhere else in your life that they can.

Admissions takes great pains to make sure the school itself is diverse (50/50 guy-girl ratio at a tech school, for example), and so your interactions with other students are guaranteed to force you to work through any diversity-related issues you may have coming in.

amichail2• 17 years ago

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."

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

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.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

'Minority' status is very local. Globally, Asians are in the majority - and indeed, have lately become so here in San Francisco too. I left for a few years in 1999 and when I came back 5 years later I noticed the demographic shift on the first day.

mojaam• 17 years ago

Speaking from experience, that makes a lot of sense. I go to a university with a very large percentage of Asians and every group seemed to stick to their own group it seems not that there's anything wrong with that.

dkarl• 17 years ago

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.

amichail2• 17 years ago

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?

carterschonwald• 17 years ago

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

makecheck2• 17 years ago

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.

philwelch7• 17 years ago

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.

makecheck2• 17 years ago

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.

kragen2• 17 years ago

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

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.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

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".

lionhearted• 17 years ago

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.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

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.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

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.

Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice

Related Stories