Non-Diverse Friends Means You're Racist

Hopefully it is obvious this is another intentionally edgy title. No one is saying if you have all friends that look like you, you are racist. I mean, maybe you are, but it is a pretty far jump in correlation.

The Framing of a Statistic

Recently, or a while ago depending on when you are reading this, Vox, a company I love and respect put out this video. Around the 6:06 mark they site a 2014 study showing who Americans have as friends, by race*. The results are:

75% of white people only have white friends
65% of black people only have black friends
46% of hispanics only have hispanic friends

Okay, cool. So what? Well they kind of implied this was a problem and implied white people are the most racist. "Gee, looks like white people are sticking to themselves... Awfully racist..."

To me, this is a grave abuse of math. It fails to consider the population of America. Consider the following two made up statistics and made sarcastic replies to them

50% of red haired people only have red haired friends
- Do they have many friends? And where do they find them? Only 2% of people have red hair, so is there a secret society bringing everyone together?
99% of people are only have friends who live on earth.
- Well duh? Thats pretty much most people.

Context for Demographic Statistics

Okay, my examples were intentionally ridiculous and meant to be extreme to illustrate the point. Consider the following additions to the statistics that adds the US population distribution:

So maybe think of it this way. If would make a new friend by picking blindly out of a hat, about 61% of your friends would be white, 13% would be black and 16% would be hispanic. So for our white people group, they selected about 73% of their friends as white isn't too far from expected.

But what about the other groups of people? In a completely uniform, non discriminatory, etc. etc. society, a black person would only have 13% chance of making a black friend... not 65%.

So does the graph show the reverse? That the other groups are more racists than white people? Er... no. Not really.

This is quite a silly metric in some ways. It should and will be naturally skewed because it doesn't consider context, and mathematically speaking the population being sampled. For example, if you like your family, and they have a similar ethnic background to you (likely, but not always), you would naturally associate with people of your own ethnicity more. A valid, and difficult, approach would be to sample the people that live within 10 miles of you and see if your friend group looks similar to that population.

Emphasis on the ONLY

The only is the twist here that makes everyone look bad. So as a white guy, if I have one friend, the chances of him only being white is 61%. Checks out. But that is your first friend. I am going to assume you have more than one.

Consider the following cases:

So if I have two friends, the probability both would be white is 61% x 61% = 38%. Okay, not as good.
What if you are average and have 9 friends? That would be 1.2%, and yeah, that's pretty bad still.
But wait! What if you assume half of your friends are family, and racially similar? Now you are at 9%... still not good.

Lets do the same math for all groups:

Final Thoughts on Non-Diverse Friends

Calling this metric sill was overly polite. It's pretty stupid. It doesn't give contexts and masks the real issue: All groups could do better at making more diverse friends.

It would be great if everyone's friend group looked like the UN. But it doesn't. And it wouldn't make sense either. You live in your local community, which is not reflective of the entire world or possibly even the country. Make diverse friends and make friends with everyone you meet. But don't make people feel bad for having a community of friends that reflects their community.

*Race is a hard and inexact word, because it's not really a thing. I don't want to digress too much, but its the term they used so I am sticking to it.

**Also, sorry for any awkward wording. Some phrases like "whites only group" or "the only white group" can just start to sound intrinsically wrong.

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