Segregation today: Many Americans have no friends outside their race

About 40 percent of white Americans and 25 percent of non-white Americans only have friends of their own race, according to a recent Reuters poll.

The poll, conducted with Ipsos, also showed that 30 percent of Americans don't interact with other races at work.

"This country has a pretty long history of restriction on inter-racial contact and for whites and blacks, even though it's in the past, there are still echoes of this," said Ann Morning, an associate professor in the department of sociology at New York University, in the Reuters report.

Brittney Cooper, a contributing writer at Salon, said the poll results were unsurprising.

"I believe deeply in the power of friendship to make us better human beings," she wrote. "But interracial friendships, especially in adulthood, require a level of risk and vulnerability that many of us would rather simply not deal with. And that is perhaps one of racism's biggest casualties: Beyond the level of systemic havoc that racism wreaks on the material lives of people of color, in a million and one ways every day, it reduces the opportunity of all people to be more human."

On The Daily Circuit, we'll discuss America's current state of segregation and the complexities of interracial friendships.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE POLL:

• Interracial Friendships Are Not A 'Struggle' For Me
While I have no intention of dismissing Cooper's points or discrediting her experiences, I can't wrap my head around her suggestion that interracial friendships die out with age — and are, by definition, frustrating and fruitless endeavors. (Huffington Post)

• Some Of My Best Friends Aren't Black Or Brown Or Asian...
The Reuters/Ipsos survey found that people from the South were less likely to have more than five acquaintances of another race. But nine of the 10 blackest states, by proportion, are southern. And an influx of Latino children means that more than half of the South's school population are kids of color. So there's at least theoretical proximity between lots of black folks, lots of Latinos, and lots of white folks in the South. But, still, people there reported social networks that were more monochromatic than those in the rest of the country. (NPR)

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