Out in Harvard Square on Saturday night a bunch of us ate dinner next to a birthday party of 10 Wellesley College students. The birthday girl happened to be black, which did not surprise us. All 9 of her friends were also black, which did surprise us. After the girls had left the restaurant the question arose “What are the odds that 100 percent of a Wellesley student’s friends would be of the same race?” One of my dinner companions offered the following explanation: “Colleges have special pre-enrollment programs for black students. They show up in July and make a lot of friends. When the whites and Asians show up in September the black kids already have a complete social circle and don’t need to make friends among the ‘new people’.”
[Some clever readers wondered in the comment section whether an all-white group of students would have been as surprising. Let’s see if we can remember our 8th-grade math… Wellesley College reports that 6 percent of their student body is black (source). If the other 94 percent were white the probability of a white girl who chose her friends at random having 9 white friends would be 0.94^9 or 57 percent (not to the 10th power because we fixed the first girl as white). So about half of the groups of 10 that you observed would randomly be all-white. If a black Wellesley student, on the other hand, chose 9 friends at random the chance of them being all-black would be 0.06^9 or 1 in 9.9 billion (i.e., if you saw 20 student groups per day it you’d need to wait for about 225 million years before seeing a group like we saw on Saturday night). In practice, of course, Wellesley is like most other good colleges in having a lot of Asian-American and Asian-Asian students. Whites, including those with Hispanic surnames, constitute only 52 percent of the students. The probably of an all-white group of 10 being assembled randomly is therefore around 1/10th of 1%. This is consistent with casual observations around Cambridge, where it is very unusual to see a group of 10 undergraduates without any Asian-Americans.]
Don’t get it – would this have even been a story if the girl and her group had all been white ? What is your point ?
I think that any college student who goes to an ethnically diverse school nowadays would tell you that this is not an unusual phenomenon, and that it is not limited to blacks.
I finished undergrad nearly a year and a half ago (at Case Western Reserve University), but while I was in school, a walk through the dinning hall at lunch or dinner time would frequently reveal an “Indian” table, a “Korean” table, a “Black” table, etc… along with many other tables filled with the mixture of races that one would expect.
I don’t know about pre-enrollment programs (I’m not sure that such a program existed at Case), but I suspected that a lot of this has to do with the ethnically-oriented student organizations (African American Society, Asian American Alliance, Korean Student Association, Indian Student Association).
I don’t think it’s necessarily a good or a bad thing.
I think his point was that at a school that is not ethnically diverse (at least vis-a-vis the black student population), this sort of pre-orientation program makes it even less likely that there will be racial diversity in your average student’s circle of friends.
I would assume he is saying that the pre-orientation somewhat undercuts the colleges intent of fostering social diversity.
If the student body is 90% white, and social groups were colorblind a table of whites sitting together would not be a statistic oddity. A table full of minorities (10%) would. This suggests that social groups are, for better or worse, not colorblind. No biting needed.
My college experience was similar to Josh Staiger’s. Despite a bureaucracy committed to forcing “diversity” down our throats (including obligatory “racial sensitivity” sessions for residence hall dwellers), the dining hall tables inevitably sorted themselves by ethnic, racial, and sometimes even political lines. The Hispanics sat together, the Korean Christians sat (and prayed) together, the Blacks sat together…. even the Communists had their own table.
I think this behavior is instinctive (“birds of a feather flock together”) rather than reflecting prejudice (but that’s instinctive too, despite Hammerstein’s assertion that “you’ve got to be carefully taught”). The strangest such example was the table where I often sat, the one populated with Jews. None of us were religiously observant, and most of us lacked any obvious distinguishing features that might have identified us as Jews– no large noses, no New York accents, no Star of David pendants (the only people who wore those were “Messianic” Jews-for-Jesus who were definitely NOT welcome). Yet somehow we recognized each other and congregated at the appropriate table.
Thus I’m not surprised the birthday girl’s friends were all of her own race. I doubt the pre-enrollment program had anything to do with it. It’s just a natural tendency. The only way it will change is if free interracial procreation ultimately does away with races (which can only be a good thing for our species). But I suspect that even on a planet full of “mutts” people will find some way to segregate themselves.
While I do tend to gravitate towards people similar to I, which means the same race, I have been surprised at the diversity that occurs in rare situations. While studying in India my friends and I happened to frequently hang out with a large group of young Arab men, as well as a few Indians and people from North Africa. Despite our diversity we noticed obvious racism and predjudice practiced in India. I have also noticed that I have the occasional friend who seems to be color blind and attracts friends of all ages, races, and nationalities. These are inevitably among my favorite and busiest people. I always wonder how they manage to befriend so many different people but have never discovered their secret.
Perhaps the explanation was that these were all sisters of the Xi Tau chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. This group is comprised of African Americans from Babson College, Bentley College, Brandeis University, Harvard University, Lesley University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Wellesley College.