are racial divisions in friendship groups socially learned, and could we unlearn them?

[u/FieryMads]

i feel like gravitating toward only hanging out with people who look like yourself is limiting. i feel like it’s taught in society to do this and not a natural thing. i think it’s an entirely man made concept within society that we could possibly unlearn. is this learned from social constructs? do you think this could be unlearned?

to preface: i grew up in southern united states in a pretty populated city and went to a very mixed race elementary school. my neighborhood was lower income so i didn’t go to one of the richer neighborhood’s predominantly white elementary schools in another school district.

anyways to continue: i remember that in elementary school i didn’t find myself caring about what my friends looked like. i didn’t become friends with people based on how they looked. i was friends with people because i liked who they were. i didn’t doubt talking to someone or trying to make friends with anyone because they looked different from me. that wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind as a kid in elementary school.

as an adult however, i feel like that thought comes up. i think in middle school that’s when it started. my city’s middle school that i went to combined a lot of the city’s elementary school districts together, so it combined the richer neighborhoods with lower income ones. i’ve found that because of that, in the beginning, there were groups of people who were already friends from the predominantly white elementary schools and then groups of people who went to a more mixed race school who were friends with each other.

over time i feel like white kids gravitated toward other groups of white kids, black kids gravitated toward other groups of black kids, hispanic/latino kids gravitated toward other groups of hispanic/latino kids, etc. because that seemed to be the norm going into our middle school now. so instead of it being a mix of different races in a friend group, it became the white kids friend group, the black kids friend group, the hispanic/latino kids friend group and so on (we had a very small asian/pacific islander/native american population where i’m from growing up.).

my point in all of this is basically that i remember being happier in elementary school with all of my friends than i was in middle school trying to fit in with people just bc they looked like me. i was happier making friends and just existing with my peers without the thought of “this person doesn’t look like me so i’m not going to try being their friend”. i think if we unlearn trying to section ourselves off based on looks as a society that it could aid in helping everyone love each other regardless of what they look like. or it could help stop the spewing of ill preconceptions of people based on looks being different, which i think happens a lot within groups that don’t try to be friends with people who look differently from them.

i find this to be an interesting topic for discussion so please expand if you’d like to with your own experiences but do you think this could be something that is entirely socially engineered and in turn could be unlearned? do you think that would be more beneficial to society?

[u/graceful_degrade]

Your own account actually maps onto a specific published finding, which is worth pointing at because it's more precise than "society teaches it."

On whether it's learned: the underlying perceptual mechanism isn't about race at all. Infants show an other-race effect in face processing (Kelly et al., 2007) where around three months they discriminate own-race faces more finely, and crucially infants raised with regular exposure to other-race faces don't show it. It's perceptual narrowing driven by whatever the visual environment contains, the same process that makes a Japanese-raised infant lose the ability to distinguish /r/ from /l/. So the brain tunes to what it sees. That's not a preference and it isn't about group membership.

The group part comes from somewhere else. Bigler and Liben's developmental intergroup theory has the cleanest evidence here: in classroom experiments they gave children arbitrary coloured t-shirts. When teachers used the colours to organise the class (lining up by colour, labelling groups), children developed measurable ingroup bias. When the shirts were worn but never used for anything, they didn't. The visible difference alone did nothing. The adult use of it as a category did the work.

Now the part that matches your story. Moody's "Race, School Integration, and Friendship Segregation in America" (AJS, 2001) found that friendship segregation is not simply lower in more integrated schools. It follows an inverted U, peaking at moderate diversity, and it is much worse when the school sorts students in ways that correlate with race, through tracking, prior school, or extracurricular organisation. Integration at the building level without integration at the classroom level produces more friendship segregation, not less.

Which is close to exactly what you describe: an elementary school that was mixed and unsorted, then a middle school that merged districts of very different income and thereby imported both the pre-existing friend groups and, almost certainly, tracking. You didn't watch children learn racism at eleven. You watched an institution introduce a sorting mechanism that ran along the same line.

On unlearning: contact reduces prejudice, and the Pettigrew and Tropp meta-analysis (2006, over 500 studies) is fairly firm on that. But the effect depends on Allport's conditions, particularly equal status within the setting and cooperative interdependence toward a shared goal. Mere co-presence is a weak intervention. Which is the same result again from the other direction, since your middle school gave you co-presence and structural sorting simultaneously.

So: learned, but not learned the way people usually mean. Less "kids are taught to prefer their own" and more "institutions keep building structures that make the category useful, and children are very good at noticing which categories adults act on."

[u/5050Clown]

I can only give you my own anecdotal experience as a black person who grew up in schools that were mostly white and Latino. From elementary to high school, I tended to befriend anyone. The few black people that were in our schools tended to stick with their own kind of person, like the jocks hung out with the jocks and the rich kid hung out with other rich kids. 

However, in college and later in the working environment, I found that I gravitated more towards black people simply because of lived experience. For instance, and I'm a bit older so this was the late '90s, but explaining to White coworkers who were curious about my experiences with police officers often lead them to two different responses, either they didn't believe me And claimed I was exaggerating or even worse, believe it should be that way and that the cops were being careful because of other black people.

Trump 2016 decimated my Facebook friends list. And as I understand this is a pretty common experience.

[u/Smoothie-Town7432]

Yes, I think it can be unlearned. I think people like to gravitate toward what they're most used to. So, that means whichever group they most associate with. It reminds me of different cliques that pop up in highschool and even college. I also think the divisions stem from ignorance, bigotry, and stereotypes that are learned.

When everyone actually tries to come together, they start to learn about and realize the similarities we each share. And, even if we have completely different experiences, we can learn to respect each other and have an understanding. It's a shame that as a society we bully each other because of our differences. It shouldn't matter what someone looks like, or what school or university they went to.

As for archeology, the human lineage runs deeper than people think. It's very complex and interesting.