self segregation essay

The Stripes

Voices on race, culture, and minority identity.

The Black Kids At the Table: Understanding Self-Segregation

This past summer the University of Connecticut made headlines when it announced that it would establish a separate housing section particularly for black male students. Immediately, this decision sparked outrage and criticism, with detractors accusing the administration of encouraging a separatist atmosphere. The magazine The National Review went so far as to say that the new policy encouraged “racial isolation and stereotyping, along with a sense of grievance and a victim mentality” . It reopened a larger conversation about the role that race-specific spaces play on college campuses; the term “self-segregation” began to fly around. Certain sources like the NPR and Fox News paralleled Uconn’s new project with the racist policies of the 1960s. “Self-segregation” almost always has a certain ‘tsk-tsk’ connotation, as if minorities were doing themselves a disservice by primarily associating with those that belong to the same race and/or culture as them.

I can’t help but notice that whenever this topic is discussed, debated, or analyzed it’s in a negative way. Having attended racially diverse schools for most of my life, the first time I really encountered this phenomenon was in high school. Predominately white, with a socio-economic spectrum that mostly ranged from upper-middle class to extremely wealthy, there were hardly enough black kids to even form a group. My school did however, have a lot of international students from China. These kids consorted almost exclusively with each other. They sat together in classes, at lunch, and only joined clubs that already had a significant number of Asian international members. I remember at the time, I too, looked upon this behavior with disapproval. Didn’t they know what they’re missing? I thought. What’s the point of coming to a different country only to befriend others of the same race and background as you?

Cultural organizations on college campuses are often accused of fostering this mentality. That by creating social groups along racial and ethnic lines, members of these groups are isolating themselves from the greater community. Supposedly, the whole point of college is to experience diversity at its fullest and to be placed in a situation where you are forced to interact with people different from yourself. Those in favor of these associations say that their purpose is to create safe spaces for minorities on campus, where they can feel welcome and comfortable. ‘But college should make you uncomfortable’, detractors say, ‘that is its purpose’.

To me, these types of comments always sound incredibly tone-deaf. Chances are, unless you are one of the few white Americans who decides to enroll in a historically black college/university, you will always be the majority. The entire college campus is a safe space for white Americans by default. It’s not just reasonable, but healthy for ethnic minorities to carve out cultural spaces for themselves in these predominantly white institutions. Usually in the context of this debate, college campuses are made out to be this hypothetical “utopia” free from prejudice and tension. In reality, however, this is obviously not the case. Speaking from my personal experience as a black woman, I can say that attending a predominately white university such as Princeton as a minority is difficult, to say the least. Even taking out the possibility of experiencing outright racism, one still is forced to operate in the smothering, eurocentrically-oriented, racially-biased atmosphere that is inherent at these elite institutions. Thankfully, I have never experienced any direct racially-motivated aggression from my peers. I have, however, had to sit through Near Eastern studies classes that only talk about the Middle East in the context of its interactions with the US and Europe. I have experienced the constant tug-of-war between cultural pride and assimilation, that is part and parcel of existing in a majority white community. I have had to live and learn in a place where white is the default, the exemplar, and the standard. Therefore, I appreciate the fact that there are places where I can be free of that, even if only for a few hours. My desire to hang out with other black people doesn’t discourage me from making friends of other races as well, and I’ve never felt that the Black Student Union’s presence was so demanding or restrictive that I felt pressured to only socialize with people of the same race.

We should also keep in mind that the topic of self-segregation is not a cut-and-dry issue. It raises the question of what exactly the purpose of diversity on college campuses is. By nature of being a minority, one is usually forced to interact with others of a different race—that race being the majority race. The opposite is true for those in the majority race, for whom it is wholly possible to never have to mingle with minority races. Data released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that 75% of white Americans have completely white social circles, while less than two thirds of African-Americans can say the same . Statistically, if anyone is guilty of unconscious self-segregation, it’s white people.

I feel a twinge of guilt now, when I think back on my criticism of the Asian international students at my high school. When I think about it, it’s human nature to want to associate with those with whom I have something in common, whether that thing is athleticism, socio-economic class, a passion for a particular hobby or activity, or even gender in the case of sororities and fraternities. However, often that unifying factor is less visible than something as obvious as race, such as in the above examples, and therefore is subject to less criticism. Despite the statistics quoted in the last paragraph, because white is the default in America, seeing groups of white Americans is not just considered normal, but expected. When we see a social circle made up completely of a certain minority race, it seems unusual, conspicuous. We automatically get the impression that the people in question are trying to sequester themselves and avoid interacting with other people, rather than that they may just feel more comfortable around people with whom they share race and/or culture.

Is there not a space for individual communities within the broader one? It is entirely possible to be a part of multiple social circles, one that is made up members of one’s own race, and others that are not. The existence of cultural organizations or spaces set aside for minorities does not demand isolation of its members. If we put this in the context of Princeton as an example, it is obviously possible for one to be an active and involved member of Princeton Latinos y Amigos and still have the opportunity to interact with people of a different heritage through classes, clubs, and residential colleges. Whether or not one wants a homogenous social circle is an individual choice–so the existence of an all-black dorm, or an organization specifically for Hispanic people cannot be blamed for these decisions. These spaces provide us with that option, give us the ability to have that choice. And I for one, value it.

Destiny Salter

Self-segregation: how a personalized world is dividing Americans

Most people aren’t looking to self-segregate, but the abundance of choice made possible by technology, alongside military privatization, makes it too easy

I t’s a fact: while Americans have countless tools with which to connect with one another, we are also watching fragmentation, polarization, and de-diversification happen en masse. The American public is self-segregating, tearing at the social fabric of the country.

Many in the tech world imagined that the internet would connect people in unprecedented ways, allow for divisions to be bridged and wounds to heal – a Kumbaya dream of sorts. Today, those same dreamers find it quite unsettling to watch as the tools that were designed to bring people together are used by people to magnify divisions and undermine social solidarity.

These tools were built in a bubble, and that bubble has burst.

Nowhere is this more acute than with Facebook . Naive as hell, Mark Zuckerberg dreamed he could build the tools that would connect people at unprecedented scale, both domestically and internationally. He still clings to that hope while facing increasing attacks about the role that Facebook is playing in magnifying social divisions. Although critics love to paint him as only motivated by money, he genuinely wants to make the world a better place and sees Facebook as a tool to connect people, not empower them to self-segregate.

The problem is not simply the “ filter bubble ”, Eli Pariser’s notion that personalization-driven algorithmic systems help silo people into segregated content streams. Facebook’s claim that content personalization plays a small role in shaping what people see compared with their own choices is accurate, so they have every right to be annoyed. I couldn’t imagine Time Warner being blamed for who watches Duck Dynasty v Modern Family .

And yet what Facebook does do is mirror and magnify a trend that’s been unfolding in the US for the last 20 years: a trend of self-segregation that is enabled by technology in all sorts of complicated ways.

The US can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference. Right now, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences.

Two contemporary trend lines can help us understand this.

Privatizing the military: a blow to the diversification America’s social fabric

The US army – once a tool of desegregation.

The voluntary US military is, in many ways, a social engineering project.

The public understands the military as a service organization, dedicated to protecting the country’s interests. Yet when recruits sign up, they are promised training and job opportunities. Individual motivations vary tremendously, but many are enticed by the opportunity to travel the world, participate in a cause with a purpose, and get the heck out of Dodge. Everyone expects basic training to be physically hard, but few recognize that some of the most grueling aspects of signing up have to do with the diversification project that is central to the formation of the American military.

Yet the US military was desegregated in 1948, six years before Brown v Board of Education forced desegregation of schools. And the supreme court ruled that LGBT individuals could openly serve in the military before they could legally marry.

Morale is often proposed as the main reason soldiers should not be forced to entrust their lives to people who are different from them. Yet time and again, this justification collapses under broader interests to grow the military.

As a result, commanders are forced to find ways to build up morale across difference, to actively seek to break down barriers to teamwork, and to help a group of people whose demographics, values, politics and ideologies are as varied as the country’s jell. In the process, they build one of the most crucial social infrastructures of the country. They build the diverse social fabric that underpins democracy.

Tons of money was poured into defense after 9/11, but the number of people serving in the US military today is far lower than it was throughout the 1980s. Why?

Starting in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, the US privatized huge chunks of the military. This means that private contractors and their employees play critical roles in everything, from providing food services to equipment maintenance to military housing.

The impact of this on the role of the military in society is significant. For example, it undermines recruits’ ability to get training to develop critical skills that will be essential in civilian life. Instead, while serving on active duty, they spend much more time on the frontlines and in high-risk battle, increasing the likelihood that they will be physically or psychologically harmed. The impact on skills development and job opportunities is tremendous, but so is the impact on the diversification of the social fabric.

Private vendors are not engaged in the same social engineering project as the military and, as a result, tend to hire and fire people based on their ability to work effectively as a team. Like many companies, they have little incentive to invest in helping diverse teams learn to work together as effectively as possible. Building diverse teams – especially ones in which members depend on each other for their survival – is extremely hard, time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting. As a result, private companies focus on “culture fit”, emphasize teams that get along, and look for people who already have the necessary skills, all of which helps reinforce existing segregation patterns.

The result is that, in the last 20 years, we’ve watched one of our major structures for diversification collapse without anyone taking notice. And because of how it’s happened, the process is also connected to job opportunities and economic opportunity for many working- and middle-class individuals, seeding resentment and hatred.

A self-segregated college life

Muslim female students at University of Houston, Texas.

If you ask a college admissions officer at an elite institution to describe how they build a class of incoming freshmen, you will quickly realize that the American college system is a diversification project.

Unlike colleges in most parts of the world, the vast majority of freshmen at top-tier universities in the US live on campus with roommates who are assigned to them. Colleges approach housing assignments as an opportunity to pair diverse strangers with one another to build social ties. This makes sense given how many friendships emerge out of freshman dorms. By pairing middle-class kids with students from wealthier families, elite institutions help diversify the elites of the future.

This diversification project produces a tremendous amount of conflict. Although plenty of people adore their college roommates and relish the opportunity to get to know people from different walks of life as part of their college experience, there is an amazing amount of angst about dorm assignments and the troubles that brew once folks try to live together in close quarters. At many universities, residential life is often in the business of student therapy as students complain about their roommates and dorm-mates.

Yet just like in the military, learning how to negotiate conflict and diversity in close quarters can be tremendously effective in weaving the social fabric.

In the spring of 2006, I was doing fieldwork with teenagers at a time when they had just received acceptances to college. I giggled at how many of them immediately wrote to the college in which they intended to enroll, begging for a campus email address so that they could join Facebook through the school (before Facebook was broadly available). In the previous year, I had watched the previous class look up roommate assignments on MySpace so I was prepared for the fact that they’d use Facebook to do the same. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly they would all get on Facebook, map the incoming freshman class, and use this information to ask for a roommate switch.

Before they even arrived on campus in August or September, they had self-segregated as much as possible.

A few years later, I watched another trend hit: cellphones. While these were touted as tools that allowed students to stay connected to parents (which prompted many faculty to complain about “helicopter parents” arriving on campus), they really ended up serving as a crutch to address homesickness, as incoming students focused on maintaining ties to high school friends rather than building new relationships.

Students go to elite universities to “get an education”. Few realize that the true quality product that elite colleges in the US have historically offered is social network diversification. Even when it comes to job acquisition, sociologists have long known that diverse social networks (“weak ties”) are what increase job prospects. By self-segregating on campus, students undermine their own potential while also helping fragment the diversity of the broader social fabric.

Diversity is hard

‘Increasingly, the technologies and tools around us allow us to self-segregate with ease’.

Diversity is often touted as highly desirable. Indeed, in professional contexts, we know that more diverse teams often outperform homogeneous teams. Diversity also increases cognitive development, both intellectually and socially. And yet actually encountering and working through diverse viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It’s emotionally exhausting. It can be downright frustrating.

Thus, given the opportunity, people typically revert to situations where they can be in homogeneous environments. They look for “safe spaces” and “culture fit”. Systems that are “personalized” are highly desirable. Most people aren’t looking to self-segregate, but they do it anyway.

Increasingly, the technologies and tools around us allow us to self-segregate with ease. Is your uncle annoying you with his political rants? Mute him. Tired of getting ads for irrelevant products? Reveal your preferences. Want your search engine to remember the things that matter to you? Let it capture data. Want to watch a TV show that appeals to your senses? Here are some recommendations.

Any company whose business model is based on advertising revenue and attention is incentivized to engage you by giving you what you want. And what you want in theory is different than what you want in practice.

Consider, for example, what Netflix encountered when it started its streaming offer. Users didn’t watch the movies that they had placed into their queue. Those movies were the movies they thought they wanted, movies that reflected their ideal selves – 12 Years a Slave, for example. What they watched when they could stream whatever they were in the mood for at that moment was the equivalent of junk food – reruns of Friends, for example. (This completely undid Netflix’s recommendation infrastructure, which had been trained on people’s idealistic self-images).

The divisions are not just happening through commercialism, though. School choice has led people to self-segregate from childhood on up. The structures of American work life mean that fewer people work alongside others from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Our contemporary culture of retail and service labor means there’s a huge cultural gap between workers and customers with little opportunity to truly get to know one another. Even many religious institutions are increasingly fragmented such that people have fewer interactions across diverse lines. (Just think about how there are now “family services” and “traditional services” which segregate people by age.)

In so many parts of public, civic and professional life, we are self-segregating, and the opportunities for doing so are increasing every day.

By and large, the American public wants to have strong connections across divisions. They see the value in it, politically and socially. But they’re not going to work for it. And given the option, they’re going to renew their license remotely, try to get out of jury duty, and use available data to seek out housing and schools that are filled with people like them.

This is the conundrum we now face.

Many pundits remarked that, during the 2016 election season, very few Americans were regularly exposed to people whose political ideology conflicted with their own . This is true. But it cannot be fixed by Facebook or the news media. Exposing people to content that challenges their perspective doesn’t actually make them more empathetic to those values and perspectives. To the contrary, it polarizes them.

What makes people willing to hear difference is knowing and trusting people whose worldview differs from their own. Exposure to content cannot make up for self-segregation.

We have been systematically undoing this, and the public has used new technological advances to make their lives easier by self-segregating. This has increased polarization, and we’re going to pay a heavy price. Rather than focusing on what media enterprises can and should do, we need to focus instead on building new infrastructures for connection where people have a reason to come together across divisions. We need that social infrastructure just as much as we need bridges and roads.

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The Tiger Parents of Silicon Valley

White and asian students in california schools self-segregate. that’s a pity—and a problem..

Photo by Torwaiphoto/ Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on Caixin.

Tiger parenting is by now a well-documented phenomenon that has given pundits everywhere an extra column or two, and, for a certain original tiger mother, a New York Times best-seller.

I have something of a strange tie to tiger parenting. I grew up in Silicon Valley, home of Apple, Google, and the new American dream, a place where almost all my friends had Asian immigrant parents. I also go to Harvard, which is coincidentally the same school that Amy Chua’s children attend or attended. I recall Lulu, the younger daughter, walking into a dorm room and introducing herself to me while I struggled mightily to pretend that I had not already pored over her life story as told by her mother.

In my hometown, tiger parenting could be seen as a sort of litmus test to see which culture you were most familiar with. For a long time, Saratoga, my hometown of 20,000, was almost entirely white. And then the tech revolution brought new-money immigrants like my Chinese-born parents into the tech sector. After a stock market boom or two, they could afford a house in Saratoga, in all its suburban glory, with pristine lawns and an allegedly pristine school system.

To say that whites resented Asians or Asians resented whites would be a gross exaggeration of a largely utopian merger. Youth soccer leagues were run by parents of multiple ethnicities: Indian, white, Chinese, Korean. Often, they were co-workers in their fields. Parental involvement was unified in activities spanning from musicals to the Parent-Teacher Association.

But it was in academics where one could smell the distinct coded scent of a split. There’s a nearby high school called Lynbrook, which by now is probably upwards of 90 percent Asian. I had a friend there who used to joke that they called the white people “the few five.” Everyone knew the one black student by name.

The Wall Street Journal came out with an article in 2005 documenting “ The New White Flight ,” a twist on the term used to describe the phenomena of white people moving out of poor neighborhoods, taking their tax dollars with them, and often leaving largely black schools derelict and underfunded. At Lynbrook and nearby schools, the Journal writes, whites weren’t quitting schools because the schools were bad. And they weren’t harming them academically when they left; more Asians just moved in.

“Quite the contrary,” the article read. “Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurricular activities like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.”

Reading that article was a bit like accessing a cipher. It swiped away the coded rhetorical veneer that I had so often heard preached at my school. The administrators at my school, largely white, had spoken for years about limiting competition, decreasing stress, preventing students from skipping math levels. Around me, I noticed that almost all the parents or students complaining about the policies were Asian.

It wasn’t until I read the article that I was able to recognize the code words that the administrators used were, intentionally or unintentionally, aimed at countering an “Asian” school. I don’t mean to suggest any covert or overt racism on the part of my school administrators. They are not racist. But what their words and policies did show was a lack of understanding of Asian academic drive. At my school, we were inoculated against the evils of doing things for college applications, counseled to lessen our workload, reminded that true meaning in life was found not in academic success but in “personal worth.” I heard the phrase “self-esteem” so much that I wanted to throw up every time an inspirational speaker waltzed into our school.

This was all well and good, but at the same time the faculty advocated taking easier classes, avoiding tutors, and participating in fewer extracurricular activities. And not only was there a parent at home to scorn those ideas, our competitive drive immediately found them repulsive, also.

My cousin, who’s from China but studies in the American school system, wanted to skip a level of science. He’s kind of a lazy guy, typical middle school student who wants only to play video games. Getting that kind of self-motivation out of him was unprecedented. But when he met one-on-one with my high school’s vice principal, the administrator strongly advised him not to do so, and warned that he would fall terribly behind, as my cousin speaks English as a second language.

This doesn’t reflect poorly on the school administrator—ironically, it shows how much he cares, deigning to meet a lowly middle school student who isn’t even in high school yet. And he was probably right, too. But judging from the reactions of my parents, and from the cousin himself, the administrator’s advice reveals at the very least a cultural gap between Asian parents and school administrators, both of whom obviously want the best for the student but have vastly differing ideas on what “best” means. “Why would you discourage a child from taking harder classes if he believes he can do it?” my mother asked.

Which leads me back to tiger parenting. Because the cultural gap wasn’t just between Asian parents and school administrators. It was also between Asian students and white students; Asian parents and white parents. And tiger parenting was predictably viewed with either amusement (this is new?) or horror. It was as if on solely the issue of tiger parenting one could tease out from a randomly selected student or parent a vast array of demographic details, as specific as what level math are you in.

And you could see it at the school. Walk into an Advanced Placement Calculus BC math course and you’d have a hard time finding a white person, besides the (wonderful) teacher. Walk among the Asian students at lunch, and you’d hear some pretty racist things said about white people. There was a somewhat famous SAT tutor in the region who told a white student, a student known for being extremely intelligent, that he was pretty much Asian.

This didn’t reflect so much on the tutor as on the culture, because people agreed with him—the white student didn’t play football, he didn’t party, and his friends were almost all Asian as well. Especially in the higher grades, as classes began to diversify between difficult and easier, the racial self-segregation based on academic lines began to emerge in even greater clarity. White kids played football, smoked weed, and hooked up on the weekends. Asians studied and took Instagram photos at McDonald’s. (Interestingly, though, the Indians at my school were said to have a pretty raucous party scene. Cannot confirm, as I was never invited.)

By the end of my junior year, the only white friends I had were two girls in my high school newspaper and a girlfriend who was half-Asian, half-white but who was by most accounts even more “Asian” than I was. This was to some extent a form of relief. Being white was no longer cool, as the two cultures had largely split. I no longer worried about appearing “too Asian” to the jocks in my middle school English class. The meanest kids, by and large athletes, were relegated to lower, less difficult classes. The culture had split soundlessly into two separate circles, each involved in its own activities and contemptuous of the other.

I think this was largely why high school was so incredibly boring. Self-segregation made the group of friends I hung out with largely mirror images of myself—high-achieving Asian Americans who weren’t 100 percent socially inept (more like 40 percent). It seemed there was no point in getting to know anyone, because they had the same cultural experiences, which was good for mutual understanding, I suppose, but utterly terrible for any sort of exchange of ideas or backgrounds.

It wasn’t until after high school that I befriended a white girl, who shared my interest in literature. I wish I had met her earlier, but it seemed that while we went the same high school, there had been no way for our paths to cross, socially or academically. We swam in different circles, and it wasn’t until the circles had disintegrated post-graduation that I realized that the other circle existed.

My high school, academically top-of-the-line, illustrates one of the many absurdities of a country populated by different cultures and yet seemingly still possessed by that primordial urge to seek those whose skin color is the same—which goes to show once again that what is natural is not always good. In the end, we self-segregated because it made us feel more comfortable. And we lost out on all sorts of chaotic cultural interactions that might have happened in between.

Self-Segregation on the Quad

When I got to college in America, I was struck by how segregated the female friendships were. Not even just racially, but socioeconomically. The middle-class White women were all friends with other middle-class White women. The upper-class/affluent Black women were all friends with other affluent Black women. The poor/new immigrant women were all friends with one another (Hispanic with Hispanic, Asian with Asian). OCCASIONALLY there was some leakage. The affluent White women in the societies were friends with one or two non-White women, but only because they were rich and part of the society. When racial issues cropped up, the Black women would sometimes allow Asian and Hispanic women into their circles. Otherwise, it was the strangest thing I saw.

In a 100-friend scenario, the average white person has 91 white friends; one each of black, Latino, Asian, mixed race, and other races; and three friends of unknown race. The average black person, on the other hand, has 83 black friends, eight white friends, two Latino friends, zero Asian friends, three mixed race friends, one other race friend and four friends of unknown race.

I loved college, but seeing how segregated female friendships were (male friendships seemed slightly more porous but just barely) prepared me for some of the dysfunctions I see in American adult society today. Everything from dating (or the lack of [interracial] dating between certain groups), to hiring, to representations in the media. If you only associate yourself with people who look like you, there are a lot of people who won't be part of the system. And a lot of people who you won't feel inclined to care about.

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Getting Real About Race is an edited collection of short essays that address the most common stereotypes and misconceptions about race held by students, and by many in the United States, in general. Key Features

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Minority Student Clubs: Segregation Or Integration?

By Gabriela Moro

Published: July 31, 2016

Minority representation on college campuses has and is expected to increase significantly in the coming years: "By 2015, undergraduate enrollment is projected to expand by 2.6 million, 80 percent of these being minority students. White undergraduate enrollment is projected to decrease from 70.6 percent in 1995 to 62.8 percent in 2015 (Carnevale & Fry, 2000), with a corresponding increase in the percentage of minority students from 29.4 percent in 1995 to 37.2 percent in 2015" (U.S. Census Bureau). Universities have made it a priority to increase diversity, or the representation of racially or ethnically underrepresented groups, on their campuses in order to prepare students for a culturally diverse U.S. democratic society (Hurtado, Ruiz 3-4). To complement this increase, universities across the U.S. have implemented minority student clubs to provide safe and comfortable environments for minority students to thrive in their academic and social lives with peers who have similar backgrounds. However, do these minority groups amplify students' tendency to self-segregate with peers similar to themselves? Do minority groups inhibit students from engaging in diverse relationships, which is a major goal in higher education?

Many view minority student programs to be positive and integral to minority students' college experience; however, some feel that these clubs are not as productive in promoting cultural immersion and diverse interaction. Self-segregation is common among college students who experience a racially diverse campus for the first time (Martin 7; vol.55 p.720). Beyond this, minority student clubs promote a type of cultural loyalty that may lead to self-segregation:

Although some participants acknowledged limited cross-cultural collaboration and interaction, most participants noted that racial segregation, including the segregation among student organizations, was problematic. This could be an indication that the extent to which institutions support interaction and collaboration among student organizations may, in part, determine the extent to which it fosters cross-cultural skills among its minority students, but this requires further inquiry. (Museus 6; vol. 49 p.581).

Julie J. Park, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Maryland, organized a study in which she examined how participation in college student organizations and development of interracial friendships are related. Park suggests "if students spend the majority of time in such groups [Greek, ethnic, and religious student organizations], participation may affect student involvement in the broader diversity of the institution" (Park 7; vol.55 p.642). If minority students form all of their social and academic ties within their minority group, the desired cultural immersion among the study body could suffer. However, minority clubs have proved to be beneficial to minority students who enter a campus climate that is less racially and ethnically diverse than others. The entire student body of a university would benefit from increased cultural competency if campuses also implemented multicultural advocacy clubs rather than just selective minority clubs.

To frame my discussion in terms of the two sides of my argument, I will use an article from the College Student Journal that distinguishes two types of students: one student that believes minority clubs are essential for minority students to stay connected with their culture, while the other student believes minority clubs isolate minorities and increase the lack of diverse interaction among students. To pursue the question of whether or not minority student groups segregate minorities from the rest of the student body and increase a lack of cultural awareness, I will use perspectives from minority students to show that minority programs are especially helpful for first-year students. I will also use other student perspectives to provide direct insight into student experiences of self-segregation and to show that when taken too far, minority groups can become self-segregating and defy what most universities claim to be their diversity goals. Statistical and sociological studies of both majority and minority student experiences, such as developing diverse friend groups on college campuses, will contribute to a better understanding of the role minority clubs play on college campuses and offer a complete answer to my question about the actual productiveness of minority programs.

Ingram, Assistant Dean of Multicultural Affairs, Chaudhary, Master of Extension Education, and Jones former vice provost for educational equity (all at Pennsylvania State University) conducted a study that explored how biracial students interact with others on the college campus. The three authors concluded that there are two definite groups of people who view race-oriented student services (ROSS) differently: "Although some argue that these race-oriented student services (ROSS) are divisive and damage White-minority relations (Stem & Gaiter, 1994), others support these services as providing a safe place and meeting the needs of minority students to develop a sense of racial pride, community and importance (Patton, 2006)" (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 298). I will start by examining the point of view of those who associate minority clubs with positive outcomes.

Minority student clubs provide familiar and approachable environments for minority students to thrive in their academic and social lives with peers who have similar backgrounds. These programs are instrumental for minority students to stay connected with their culture when they go college. Minority student programs are especially important for first-year students. They help ease first-year minority students' transition into the college environment. Ethnic student organizations help students adjust and find their place at universities that have a predominately White student body (Museus 6; vol.49 p.584). Museus, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston Graduate College of Education, concluded that universities should stress the importance of racial/ethnic groups and develop more opportunities for minority students to make connections with them. This way, students can find support from their minority peers and work together to face academic and social challenges and share in their experiences. Museus' findings suggests that minority student groups play a positive role in minority students' college experiences and are essential for these students to preserve and foster their own cultures that their university as a whole may not provide.

Hall, Cabrera and Milem conducted and examined a study that evaluated the differences between minority students and non-minority students in their predispositions to take part in diversity activities and communication with racially/ethnically diverse peers at a predominantly White university. The three agreed, "engagement with diverse peers is a learned behavior" (Hall). Students who engaged with diverse students before going to college were more likely to interact with diverse peers by the end of their sophomore year. Minority students were more predisposed than their White peers to interact with diverse peers during their freshman year (Hall). This is an indicator that minority study clubs can be helpful for first-year minority students who have not previously engaged with other minority students to do so in college, especially if the university has significant majority representation.

Professors and scholars are not the only ones who heavily support minority clubs. For example, Andrea Delgado, Denzel, and Kami Fafowora (all Harvard College Students) give their perspective on student life and multicultural identity on campus to incoming students via YouTube. The students explain how positive and influential the minority programs are on campus and how they have helped them assimilate into the college environment as a first year student: "I thought [cultural clubs were] something I maybe didn't needed but come November, I missed speaking Spanish and I missed having tacos, and other things like that. That's the reason why I started attending meetings more regularly. Latinas Unidas has been a great intersection of my cultural background and my political views" (Andrea Delgado). The experiences these minority student shared, in addition to the information provided in the studies mentioned above, support the idea that minority clubs are important for incoming students to aid in their assimilation into a very new and often intimidating environment.

While the benefits of minority student clubs are quite evident, there are several problems that arise from minority alliances. The most recognized limitation to such organizations is self-segregation. Self-segregating tendencies do not exclusively belong to minority students. College students overall possess or develop self-segregating tendencies as they enter an unfamiliar college environment for the first time: "Today, the student bodies of our leading colleges and universities are more diverse than ever. However, college students are increasingly self-segregating by race or ethnicity (Saenz, Ngai, & Hurtado, 2007)" (Martin 7; vol.55 p.720). Several studies and student opinions suggest that minority student clubs amplify students' inadvertent inclination to self-segregate. Students become comfortable with their minority peers. These students may no longer desire or feel the need to branch out of their comfort zone.

Self-segregation as a result of minority student groups not only puts those participating minority students at a disadvantage, but it also disrupts campus unity (Li). Li, a columnist for The Dartmouth College Newspaper, discusses the issue of minorities self-segregating themselves from the rest of the student population. Li agrees that these groups have positive effects, but he urges students to not get too caught up in their own minority organization that they lose cultural awareness. He indicates that ethnic self-obsession takes away from the unity of students on campus (Li). Li's observations further support the point of view that minority student clubs can be counter-productive in promoting cultural immersion on college campuses.

Three faculty members from Pennsylvania State University, Ingram, Chaudhary, and Jones, conducted a study that reveals some students feel race-oriented clubs are unnecessary, while others maintain the belief that such clubs have positive benefits. Their study, published in the College Student Journal, examines the social interactions of biracial students in U.S. colleges as of 2014, focusing on the level of interactions, which occur between biracial and mono-racial students, and highlighting recommendations by biracial students for improving inclusivity on campuses (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 299). Participants of the online survey, the method of collecting data for this study, were asked to respond in an opened ended question about what they think universities should do to create a more inviting environment for biracial students (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 303). Multiple students responded with opinions opposing the formation of both biracial and multiracial clubs: "I feel instead of having biracial and multiracial clubs the colleges should have diversity clubs and just allow everyone to get together. All these "separate'' categorizing of clubs isn't that just separation of groups?" "Having a ton of clubs that are for specific races is counter-productive. It creates segregation and lack of communication across cultures. (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 304-305)

The main concern these students voice is that these clubs can cause unnecessary separatism on campus. On the other hand, some participants "supported the creation and existence of biracial [and multi-racial] programs" (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 305-306). These students considered the benefits of bi-racial and multi-racial students coming together to form bonds and strengthen cultural ties. Other students offered suggestions for the formation of multicultural activities: "Encourage more racial integration to show students races aren't so different from each other and to lesson stereotypes." "Hold cultural events that allow students of different races to express/share their heritage." Ingram, Chaudhary, and Jones concluded that, while creating biracial and multiracial student organizations are helpful in establishing an inviting college environment for these students:

Creating a truly inclusive environment, however, requires additional efforts (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 308): these include multicultural awareness training for faculty, staff, and students, and incorporation of multicultural issues into the curriculum (White, 2006; Gasser, 2002). In addition to the creation of biracial/ multiracial clubs and organization, the students in this study want to increase awareness of the mixed heritage population among others on college campuses. (Ingram 2; vol.48 p. 308)

The presence of two very different opinions regarding the creation and existence of race-oriented clubs on college campuses reported in this study contributes to the needed recognition of the issue minority student programs can formulate and suggests ways to resolve them. Now that both viewpoints of minority student clubs have been established and evidence from both former research and student perspectives confirm that these clubs, while beneficial to minority students' experiences, can inhibit cultural immersion, I will continue with my original thought that the entire student body of a university would benefit from increased cultural competency if campuses also implemented multicultural advocacy clubs, rather than just selective minority clubs.

In order to understand why initiating diverse interaction among students is a major topic of discussion among universities, it is helpful to recognize the comprehensiveness of the three terms of diversity Patricia and Gerald Gurin, Dey, and Hurtado identify in their article published in the Harvard Educational Review . The first term defined is structural diversity , "the numerical representation of diverse [racial/ethnic] groups" (Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Peterson, & Allen, 1999 ). Nonetheless, the existence of structural diversity alone does not assure that students will develop valuable intergroup relationships (Gurin 3; vol.79 p.333). Classroom diversity , the second term, involves gaining "content knowledge" or a better understanding about diverse peers and their backgrounds by doing so in the classroom (Gurin 3; vol.79 p.333). The third type of diversity, informal interactional diversity refers to "both the frequency and the quality of intergroup interaction as keys to meaningful diversity experiences during college" (Gurin 3; vol.79 p.333). Students often encounter informal interactional diversity in social settings outside the classroom or lecture hall such as "informal discussions, daily interactions in residence halls, campus events, and social activities" (Antonio, 1998; Chang, 1996). Informal interactional diversity covers the scope of my research and aids in supporting the idea of encouraging colleges to establish social events and organizations that allow all students to experience and appreciate the variety of cultures present on campus.

The three types of diversity build the foundation for Patricia and Gerald Gurin, Dey, Hurtado's theory of educational and democratic outcomes diverse interactions in higher education produce. Even with diverse racial/ethnic groups present on campus and regular communication among students formally and informally, these researchers contend that it is not enough to provide students with the full benefits diverse interactions offer for their life after college. A greater push from educators is encouraged:

"Classroom diversity, diversity programming, opportunities for interaction, and learning across diverse groups of students in the college environment now constitute important initiatives to enhance the education of all students" (Gurin 3; vol.79 p.362). "However, in order to foster citizenship for a diverse democracy, educators must intentionally structure opportunities for students to leave the comfort of their homogenous peer group and build relationships across racially/ ethnically diverse student communities on campus" (Gurin 3; vol.79 p. 363).

These suggestions serve as an implication that reaching desired cultural immersion results from a combination of participation inside and outside minority student clubs, with the intention that both minority and majority students enjoy the benefits of their higher education.

Dr. Clayton-Pedersen, who has conducted research in Diversity in Higher Education and Musil, former Senior Vice President of Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, analyzed and published an article in the Encyclopedia of Education on multiculturalism in higher education. They reviewed the ways in which universities have incorporated diversity studies into their core curriculum over a span of years from the mid to late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. There have been significant increases in the amount of diversity courses offered and required that have the goal of preparing students for a democratic society rich in diversity (Clayton-Pederson 2; vol.5 p.1711, 11714). However, Clayton-Pederson and Musil recommend that institutions need to take a more holistic approach to their academic curriculum in order to purse a higher education program that prepares students to face "complex and demanding questions and pose and answer as they are challenged to use their new knowledge and civic, intercultural capacities to address real-world problems"(Clayton-Pederson 2; vol.5 p.1714). In accordance with Clayton-Pedersen and Musil's suggestions, I agree that a more holistic approach to the importance of diversity studies in the college curriculum and multicultural advocacy clubs is necessary in order to prepare all students, not just minority students, for the diverse world and society ahead of them.

The results the of reported research show that minority student clubs can increase self-segregation among minority students and contribute to fewer ethnically diverse interactions on college campuses. However, throughout the process of evaluation, I found that the two-sided view of how minority student clubs influence the lives of minority college students serves as an implication that a balance between providing support for minorities and avoiding segregation of these groups from the rest of the student body needs to be reached. Both sides of the argument have valid reasons for supporting or opposing aspects of minority student clubs. Ignoring the concerns of both sides would be unfair to the student body as a whole. Colleges and universities can implement multicultural events and activities for all students to participate in, especially during the freshman year, in addition to minority student programs. This is a positive initiative that will enhance the diverse interactions that occur on campuses, promote cultural immersion, and close the gap between the two perceptions of minority student clubs.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, in her book Can We Talk about Race: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation, explains three fundamental approaches to fostering a truly inclusive college environment and presents an example of a freshman program at the University of Michigan that embodies these approaches in an effective way. Affirming identity, building community, and cultivating leadership are the three approaches Tatum justifies. Affirming identity has to do with providing historically underrepresented groups with resources to develop their identity on campus such as cultural groups and centers (Tatum 114). Even so, these cultural resources "despite an institution's best efforts, are alienating at times" (Tatum 115). To relieve some of the alienating tendencies, Tatum proposes building community, which encourages appreciation of diverse interactions. She assures that "affirming identity is not a contradictory to but a prerequisite for building community. Learning to build community, to think inclusively, to cross borders, is both a challenge and a benefit of being apart of a diverse campus community" (Tatum 115). The last approach, cultivating leadership, is best explained by the Intergroup Relations Program (IGR) at the University of Michigan. The IRG Program "offers a course for first-year students that incorporates five key conditions: the presence of diverse others, a change from pre-college experiences, equality among peers, discussions under guidelines of civil discourse, and normalization and negotiation of conflict" (Tatum 117). This is a program that works to bring students together to stimulate cultural awareness in the first year with the hopes of the students' awareness developing further during their following years in higher education.

Beyond the reach of this evaluation, further research should be conducted, specifically on the types of cultural events that are most effective in promoting cultural awareness and meaningful diverse interactions among the student body. By examining different multicultural organizations from both public and private universities and comparing student experiences and participation in those programs researchers can suggest an ideal multicultural program to provide an optimal student experience.

Works Cited

Carnevale, A. P., & Fry, R. A. (2000). Crossing the great divide: Can we achieve equity when generation Y goes to college? Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 443907).

Clayton-Pedersen, Alma R., and Caryn Mctighe Musil. "Multiculturalism in Higher Education." Encyclopedia of Education . Ed. James W. Guthrie. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2002. 1709-1716. Gale Virtual Reference Library . Web. 26 Feb. 2015.

Gurin, Patricia, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin. "Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes". Harvard Educational Review 72.3 (2002): 1-26. Web. 28 Mar. 2015.

Hall, Wendell, Alberto Cabrera, and Jeffrey Milem. "A Tale Of Two Groups: Differences Between Minority Students And Non-Minority Students In Their Predispositions To And Engagement With Diverse Peers At A Predominantly White Institution." Research In Higher Education 52.4 (2011): 420-439. Academic Search Premier . Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Harvard College Admissions & Financial Aid. "Student Voices: Multicultural Perspectives." Online video. YouTube . YouTube, 7 Aug. 2014. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.

Hurtado, Sylvia, and Adriana Ruiz. The Climate For Underrepresented Groups And Diversity On Campus . 1st ed. Los Angeles, California: The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (HERI); The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), 2012. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.

Ingram, Patreese, Anil Kumar Chaudhary, and Walter Terrell Jones. "How Do Biracial Students Interact With Others On The College Campus?" College Student Journal 48.2 (2014): 297-311. Academic Search Premier . Web. 26 Feb. 2015.

Li, Johnathan. "Li: Inadvertent Self-Segregation." The Dartmouth College Newspaper . Dartmouth Inc. 13 Apr. 2013. Web. 14 Mar. 2015.

Martin, Nathan D., William Tobin, and Kenneth I. Spenner. "Interracial Friendships Across the College Years: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study". Journal of College Student Development 55.7 (2014): 720-725. Academic Search Premier . Web. 16 March. 2015.

Museus, Samuel D. "The Role of Ethnic Student Organizations in Fostering African American and Asian American Students' Cultural Adjustment and Membership at Predominantly White Institutions." Journal of College Student Development 49.6 (2008): 568-86. Web. 26. Feb. 2015.

Park, Julie J. "Clubs and Campus Racial Climate: Student Organizations and Interracial Friendship in College". Journal of College Student Development 55.7 (2014): 641-660. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 March. 2015.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Can We Talk about Race? : And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation . Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press, 2008. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28 March 2015.

Gabriela Moro

Gabriela Moro, born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, is member of the University of Notre Dame Class of 2018. As a Neuroscience and Behavior Pre-Health major, Gabriela aspires to pursue a career in medicine through which she hopes to make a lasting impact on the communication between physicians and patients. Her research paper was inspired by her experience as a first-year college student exposed to both minority and multicultural student clubs. The decision of whether to choose the minority affiliated club or non-affiliated club questioned Gabriela's understanding of the purpose behind minority student clubs and their effectiveness. Gabriela would like to especially thank her Writing and Rhetoric professor, Elizabeth Capdevielle, for guiding her through the process of writing a well-developed research paper and for being an insightful mentor.

Stopping segregation: it’s not just where you live, it’s the places you go that matter

Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences, University of Sheffield

Disclosure statement

The research mentioned in this article was part of a project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award to Professor Gill Valentine.

University of Sheffield provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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It’s widely accepted that when people of different religions and ethnicities live side by side and interact, it improves mutual trust and relations. By the same token, research shows that when there are more ethnic or religious minority people in a neighbourhood but less interaction between them and the white majority residents, the latter tend to be more prejudiced and less trusting .

This theory – based on the “contact hypothesis” – gives us reason to be concerned about segregation between white majority and ethnic or religious minority residents. That’s why a recent report claiming that ethnic segregation is increasing across the UK caused a flurry of debate about how to address the issue.

But in reality, the picture is far more complicated. Some research draws the opposite conclusion: that British cities have actually become less segregated over the years.

Other experts have criticised the way the report measured segregation, arguing that we should be more concerned about tackling racism instead. After all, even in residential areas with low levels of segregation, people can self-segregate in spaces such as community centres, cafés, sports clubs, and bars, in order to avoid contact with each other.

Beyond the neighbourhood

Wealth can also play a role: when neighbourhoods are both segregated and poor, it can lower the quality of community life, or it can enhance community welfare and support . The place where we live undoubtedly shapes our lives – but it’s not the only factor.

Let’s not forget that our attitudes toward others are shaped outside our neighbourhoods, too. We also spend time in the workplace or other institutions, such as universities, schools, parks, public services, shops and sports associations.

Research based on the European Social Survey has demonstrated that diversity in the workplace can play an even greater role in forging friendships between people of different religions and ethnicities. It has even been shown that chain cafés , which are dotted throughout cities, create a convivial spaces which enable more in-depth interactions between diverse consumers.

All of this evidence seems to indicate that the kinds of spaces where interactions take place have an impact on the attitudes of white majority people toward minorities. To better understand this link, my colleagues and I developed a study : after gathering data from surveys in Leeds, UK, and Warsaw, Poland, we analysed the prejudice of white residents of these two cities.

We asked them about their contact with people from minority groups in a variety of places. We then classified these places into five types of space, according to the different degrees of closeness they created between people. There were private spaces (homes), social spaces (social clubs, sport groups, community centres), institutional spaces (places of work and study), spaces of consumption (restaurants, pubs, bars, cafés) and public spaces (streets, parks, public transport, public services).

We measured people’s attitudes with two questions: the first was a “feeling thermometer” , where respondents express the warmth of their feelings towards other groups in terms of degrees, from zero to 100. For the second question, we asked respondents how friendly they would be towards minority groups if they became their neighbours.

Meeting places matter

The results confirmed what we suspected – that where contact takes place matters when it comes to reducing prejudice. In Leeds, people held more positive feelings towards minorities when they interacted with them in institutional and social spaces. But only encounters in social spaces would make people more friendly to new minority neighbours.

So, while sharing a workplace with minorities can improve feelings toward them, this does not necessarily translate into neighbourly friendliness among white British people.

In Warsaw, we found a positive link between feelings and meeting minority people in public and consumption spaces. In particular, encounters with minority people in bars, restaurants and cafés were more likely to lead white majority residents to be friendly to them in neighbourhoods.

We suspect that in Warsaw cafés and restaurants play a similar role to social clubs and community centres in Leeds, by bringing people of different backgrounds together. Since the opening of country’s borders in 1989, Asian ( mostly Vietnamese ) restaurants and takeaways have spread across the Polish capital. They often become the sites of the first and – as it turns out – most meaningful encounters with non-Polish residents.

All this confirms that contact between people from different backgrounds is crucial for building cohesive societies – and we know that residential segregation makes this contact less likely.

But the spaces where contact takes place matter too. Whether in Leeds or Warsaw, encounters in public spaces do not translate into friendliness toward new minority neighbours. Reducing segregation does not guarantee that everyone will get along. Rather, we should cherish social spaces, as well as bars, cafés and restaurants, where people are encouraged to act as neighbours – not just strangers living side by side.

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Self-Segregation of Students Essay Example

Pages: 3 (571 words)
Published: April 27, 2017
Type: Case Study

Self-segregation of students is taking place in high school as well as on college campuses. Student find comfort and security among their own groups but when this division occurs where individuals “hang out” with a specific race, does this encourage racism? Should action be implemented in this event to prevent self-segregation in our schools or should we treat it as a choice where students divide themselves in groups where they feel secure, regardless to the fact that by forming groups of one color that it is directly linked to encouraging racism in our schools?

What actions can be taken in encouraging students to mingle with those from different ethnic backgrounds in demoting this act of self-segregation? Cliques and self-imposed groups should be encouraged to bring others into their groups in order to prevent racial hatred, violence and fear in most instance

s. We learn from Debra Humphreys who speaks concerning the self-segregation of school students on college campuses and in high schools when she explains that recent studies show that although self-segregation in going on in our schools, it’s not a problem that should take priority over all other important matters in our educational system.

She tells us that, (Humphreys, 2007) “When students went off to college this Fall, they entered more diverse campuses than ever before. For many students, in fact, their college community is the most diverse they have ever encountered. Most students entering college today come from high schools that are predominantly or exclusively one racial or ethnic group. Given this reality, how are students interacting with one another educationally and socially in college? ” The fear of going outside what is comfortable for student

should probably be looked at more closely in order to bring less division among students.

By making schools more color friendly and using means to encourage students to go outside their boundaries and become more involved with students from other races, we can slowly stop this self-segregation on college campuses and in high schools and make segregation a thing of the past. School faculty must get involved in discussions with all students where they can demonstrate their concern for the self-segregation that is taking place and bring the topic to the forefront on the conversation, where students can have a open discussion as to why they are self-segregating.

We could possibly solve the segregation problems by allowing students to offer ideas to how we can change this problems and possibly ease the fears of students who are afraid to mingle with other races. By bringing up this issues in an open forum, we could greatly reduce the self-segregation problems in our schools and hopefully prevent this problem from escalating in the future. It is extremely important that all races come together in schools in ending self-segregation and being certain that this issue is not ignored.

If students continue to divide themselves into groups of certain color, it will only promote continuing division and will allow for racial hatred to brew and grow, until it becomes an even bigger issue for future students. We must do all that we can in avoiding self-segregation in our schools where students can concentrate on their studies, instead of social issues. By talking in groups of diverse races, where each is able to express their concerns and fears and by letting each offer

cures to this problem, we can eliminate self-segregation in our high schools and on college campuses, everywhere.

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danah boyd | apophenia

Making connections where none previously existed, why america is self-segregating.

The United States has always been a diverse but segregated country. This has shaped American politics profoundly. Yet, throughout history, Americans have had to grapple with divergent views and opinions, political ideologies, and experiences in order to function as a country. Many of the institutions that underpin American democracy force people in the United States to encounter difference. This does not inherently produce tolerance or result in healthy resolution. Hell, the history of the United States is fraught with countless examples of people enslaving and oppressing other people on the basis of difference. This isn’t about our past; this is about our present. And today’s battles over laws and culture are nothing new.

Ironically, in a world in which we have countless tools to connect, we are also watching fragmentation, polarization, and de-diversification happen en masse. The American public is self-segregating, and this is tearing at the social fabric of the country.

Many in the tech world imagined that the Internet would connect people in unprecedented ways, allow for divisions to be bridged and wounds to heal. It was the kumbaya dream. Today, those same dreamers find it quite unsettling to watch as the tools that were designed to bring people together are used by people to magnify divisions and undermine social solidarity. These tools were built in a bubble, and that bubble has burst.

Nowhere is this more acute than with Facebook. Naive as hell, Mark Zuckerberg dreamed he could build the tools that would connect people at unprecedented scale, both domestically and internationally. I actually feel bad for him as he clings to that hope while facing increasing attacks from people around the world about the role that Facebook is playing in magnifying social divisions. Although critics love to paint him as only motivated by money, he genuinely wants to make the world a better place and sees Facebook as a tool to connect people, not empower them to self-segregate .

The problem is not simply the “filter bubble,” Eli Pariser’s notion that personalization-driven algorithmic systems help silo people into segregated content streams. Facebook’s claim that content personalization plays a small role in shaping what people see compared to their own choices is accurate. And they have every right to be annoyed. I couldn’t imagine TimeWarner being blamed for who watches Duck Dynasty vs. Modern Family . And yet, what Facebook does do is mirror and magnify a trend that’s been unfolding in the United States for the last twenty years, a trend of self-segregation that is enabled by technology in all sorts of complicated ways.

The United States can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a healthy way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference.

Yet, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences. To understand this, let’s talk about two contemporary trend lines and then think about the implications going forward.

Privatizing the Military

The voluntary US military is, in many ways, a social engineering project. The public understands the military as a service organization, dedicated to protecting the country’s interests. Yet, when recruits sign up, they are promised training and job opportunities. Individual motivations vary tremendously, but many are enticed by the opportunity to travel the world, participate in a cause with a purpose, and get the heck out of dodge. Everyone expects basic training to be physically hard, but few recognize that some of the most grueling aspects of signing up have to do with the diversification project that is central to the formation of the American military.

When a soldier is in combat, she must trust her fellow soldiers with her life. And she must be willing to do what it takes to protect the rest of her unit. In order to make that possible, the military must wage war on prejudice. This is not an easy task. Plenty of generals fought hard to fight racial desegregation and to limit the role of women in combat. Yet, the US military was desegregated in 1948, six years before Brown v. Board forced desegregation of schools. And the Supreme Court ruled that LGB individuals could openly serve in the military before they could legally marry.

Morale is often raised as the main reason that soldiers should not be forced to entrust their lives to people who are different than them. Yet, time and again, this justification collapses under broader interests to grow the military. As a result, commanders are forced to find ways to build up morale across difference, to actively and intentionally seek to break down barriers to teamwork, and to find a way to gel a group of people whose demographics, values, politics, and ideologies are as varied as the country’s.

In the process, they build one of the most crucial social infrastructures of the country. They build the diverse social fabric that underpins democracy.

Tons of money was poured into defense after 9/11, but the number of people serving in the US military today is far lower than it was throughout the 1980s. Why? Starting in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, the US privatized huge chunks of the military. This means that private contractors and their employees play critical roles in everything from providing food services to equipment maintenance to military housing. The impact of this on the role of the military in society is significant. For example, this undermine recruits’ ability to get training to develop critical skills that will be essential for them in civilian life. Instead, while serving on active duty, they spend a much higher amount of time on the front lines and in high-risk battle, increasing the likelihood that they will be physically or psychologically harmed. The impact on skills development and job opportunities is tremendous, but so is the impact on the diversification of the social fabric.

Private vendors are not engaged in the same social engineering project as the military and, as a result, tend to hire and fire people based on their ability to work effectively as a team. Like many companies, they have little incentive to invest in helping diverse teams learn to work together as effectively as possible. Building diverse teams — especially ones in which members depend on each other for their survival — is extremely hard, time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting. As a result, private companies focus on “culture fit,” emphasize teams that get along, and look for people who already have the necessary skills, all of which helps reinforce existing segregation patterns.

The end result is that, in the last 20 years, we’ve watched one of our major structures for diversification collapse without anyone taking notice. And because of how it’s happened, it’s also connected to job opportunities and economic opportunity for many working- and middle-class individuals, seeding resentment and hatred.

A Self-Segregated College Life

If you ask a college admissions officer at an elite institution to describe how they build a class of incoming freshman, you will quickly realize that the American college system is a diversification project. Unlike colleges in most parts of the world, the vast majority of freshman at top tier universities in the United States live on campus with roommates who are assigned to them. Colleges approach housing assignments as an opportunity to pair diverse strangers with one another to build social ties. This makes sense given how many friendships emerge out of freshman dorms. By pairing middle class kids with students from wealthier families, elite institutions help diversify the elites of the future.

In the springs of 2006, I was doing fieldwork with teenagers at a time when they had just received acceptances to college. I giggled at how many of them immediately wrote to the college in which they intended to enroll, begging for a campus email address so that they could join that school’s Facebook (before Facebook was broadly available). In the previous year, I had watched the previous class look up roommate assignments on MySpace so I was prepared for the fact that they’d use Facebook to do the same. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly they would all get on Facebook, map the incoming freshman class, and use this information to ask for a roommate switch. Before they even arrived on campus in August/September of 2006, they had self-segregated as much as possible.

A few years later, I watched another trend hit: cell phones. While these were touted as tools that allowed students to stay connected to parents (which prompted many faculty to complain about “helicopter parents” arriving on campus), they really ended up serving as a crutch to address homesickness, as incoming students focused on maintaining ties to high school friends rather than building new relationships.

Students go to elite universities to “get an education.” Few realize that the true quality product that elite colleges in the US have historically offered is social network diversification. Even when it comes to job acquisition, sociologists have long known that diverse social networks (“weak ties”) are what increase job prospects. By self-segregating on campus, students undermine their own potential while also helping fragment the diversity of the broader social fabric.

Diversity is Hard

Diversity is often touted as highly desirable. Indeed, in professional contexts, we know that more diverse teams often outperform homogeneous teams. Diversity also increases cognitive development, both intellectually and socially. And yet, actually encountering and working through diverse viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It’s emotionally exhausting. It can be downright frustrating.

Thus, given the opportunity, people typically revert to situations where they can be in homogeneous environments. They look for “safe spaces” and “culture fit.” And systems that are “personalized” are highly desirable. Most people aren’t looking to self-segregate, but they do it anyway. And, increasingly, the technologies and tools around us allow us to self-segregate with ease. Is your uncle annoying you with his political rants? Mute him. Tired of getting ads for irrelevant products? Reveal your preferences. Want your search engine to remember the things that matter to you? Let it capture data. Want to watch a TV show that appeals to your senses? Here are some recommendations.

Any company whose business model is based on advertising revenue and attention is incentivized to engage you by giving you what you want. And what you want in theory is different than what you want in practice.

Consider, for example, what Netflix encountered when it started its streaming offer. Users didn’t watch the movies that they had placed into their queue. Those movies were the movies they thought they wanted, movies that reflected their ideal self — 12 Years a Slave , for example. What they watched when they could stream whatever they were in the mood for at that moment was the equivalent of junk food — reruns of Friends , for example. (This completely undid Netflix’s recommendation infrastructure, which had been trained on people’s idealistic self-images.)

The divisions are not just happening through commercialism though. School choice has led people to self-segregate from childhood on up. The structures of American work life mean that fewer people work alongside others from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Our contemporary culture of retail and service labor means that there’s a huge cultural gap between workers and customers with little opportunity to truly get to know one another. Even many religious institutions are increasingly fragmented such that people have fewer interactions across diverse lines. (Just think about how there are now “family services” and “traditional services” which age-segregate.) In so many parts of public, civic, and professional life, we are self-segregating and the opportunities for doing so are increasing every day.

By and large, the American public wants to have strong connections across divisions. They see the value politically and socially. But they’re not going to work for it. And given the option, they’re going to renew their license remotely, try to get out of jury duty, and use available data to seek out housing and schools that are filled with people like them. This is the conundrum we now face.

Many pundits remarked that, during the 2016 election season, very few Americans were regularly exposed to people whose political ideology conflicted with their own. This is true. But it cannot be fixed by Facebook or news media. Exposing people to content that challenges their perspective doesn’t actually make them more empathetic to those values and perspectives. To the contrary, it polarizes them. What makes people willing to hear difference is knowing and trusting people whose worldview differs from their own. Exposure to content cannot make up for self-segregation.

If we want to develop a healthy democracy, we need a diverse and highly connected social fabric. This requires creating contexts in which the American public voluntarily struggles with the challenges of diversity to build bonds that will last a lifetime. We have been systematically undoing this, and the public has used new technological advances to make their lives easier by self-segregating . This has increased polarization, and we’re going to pay a heavy price for this going forward. Rather than focusing on what media enterprises can and should do, we need to focus instead on building new infrastructures for connection where people have a purpose for coming together across divisions. We need that social infrastructure just as much as we need bridges and roads.

This piece was originally published as part of a series on media, accountability, and the public sphere . See also:

Hacking the Attention Economy by danah boyd
What’s Propaganda Got To Do With It? by Caroline Jack
Did Media Literacy Backfire? by danah boyd
Are There Limits to Online Free Speech? by Alice Marwick
How do you deal with a problem like “fake news?” by Robyn Caplan

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Self-segregation

Social Sciences

Self-segregation refers to a situation where a certain group of people separates itself from other members of society. The segregated group is not coerced to isolate itself. However, people in this group do it out of their own will. The law does not have any role self-segregation. In most cases, self-segregation is based on religious or ethnic groups. Self-segregation leads to abnormal social interaction in a country. It causes social exclusion of some groups of people in the community. There are various reasons which motivate certain groups of people to segregate themselves from other people in the society. In most cases, the groups of people who isolate themselves from the society aim to preserve their culture and tradition. Additionally, they may also seek to run away from any forms of biasness and discrimination which may be offensive to them.

There are various advantages associated with self-segregation. One of them is that the members of the isolated group get a chance to establish their services. They also get an opportunity to practice and maintain their traditions without interference from other members of the community. However, for isolated groups to preserve their culture, they should be determined to enhance the integration of other people in the society. Additionally, they should be supported by the surrounding groups in the community. Another advantage of self-segregation is that members of the isolated groups get a chance to do their things without disruption (Villalpando, 2003). Additionally, they get a chance to get rid of discriminations which may have negative consequences in their lives. Thus, self-segregation confers many benefits to the isolated group. Self-segregation leads to an increase in minority owned businesses. The isolated group no longer requires to depend on oppressive powers because they carry out their activities on their own. Since the separated groups separate by their choice, they remain protected by the law. As a result, they get a chance to carry out economic activities without external interference. The isolated group will also get an opportunity to introduce its education systems which put into consideration their cultural needs, hence helping to preserve their traditions.

However, self-segregation has variously disadvantaged to the isolated group. First, it leads to a lack of intercultural communication. As a result, it becomes hard for isolated people to gather beneficial information from other members of society. As a result, it becomes hard for the group to grow both financially and technologically. In most cases, certain groups of people isolate for fear of interacting with integrated groups. Self-segregation may lead to unwanted conflicts among various groups in society. Groups may envy each other hence leading to war like situations. Thus, despite the advantages associated with self-segregation, it has multiple shortcomings which can be detrimental to the isolated group and society in general. As a result, groups should weigh the advantages and demerits of their actions before making decisions related to self-segregation.

Self-segregation has been a common trend in the United States. The most common one in history was based on racial differences. Two main ethnic groups have occupied the United States. They constituted of the blacks and whites. Self-segregation among blacks and whites was very common in the early 20th century (Ihlanfeldt & Scafidi, 2002). People from the two racial groups preferred to live in one area. The segregation was aimed at ensuring even distribution of blacks and whites in different states. The people of color moved to the states which had a small population of the people from this group. At the beginning of the 20th century, most black occupied the south and rural areas (Simpson, 2004). On the other hand, the whites were concentrated in urban centres and north. Segregation also occurs in the modern US. In some cases, blacks prefer to live on their own without interacting with the whites. A good example is the case of the college students from the black race who wanted their dormitory to be painted their colours. They also wanted only the students from this ethnic group to be allowed to live in that dormitory. This is a clear indication that self-segregation has been in existence in history and continues to occur.

Family demographics are changing in the current world. With the increased advancement in technology, people from different b ethnicities have a better opportunity of interacting (Quan, Wang, Hui, & Luo, 2003). This has led to an increase in the cases of intermarriages. As a result, there are increased cases where the members of the same family are from different ethnic groups. As a result, it has become hard for different ethnic groups to preserve their cultures. Inter-marriages have resulted in the interaction of people with various traditions. As a result, it becomes hard for people to protect their unique ways of life. As a result, the changes in family demographics have prevented self-segregation from being successful. People are not able to isolate themselves from other members of society. A good example is that there are intermarriages between the whites and the blacks in the US. Thus, in the current world, it is hard for people from the two ethnic groups to live independently without interacting.

The population characteristics of the society are also changes. This has been brought about by industrialisation which attracts people from different ethnic groups to town centres to work in the industries. Additionally, globalisation has led to changes in the characteristics of the people in a society (Rose-Redwood, C. & Rose-Redwood, R, 2013). People can move from one country and region to another for various reasons. As a result, the current societies are composed of a mixture of people from different ethnic groups. People socialise with each other without considering their ethnic backgrounds. Additionally, great emphasis on diversity has also led to a decrease in the cases of self-segregation. People can work together and interact in various aspects of life (Lacabana, M., & Cariola, 2003). They depend on each other for multiple reasons. As a result, in the current world, it is hard for a particular group of people to live independently from other people in society. Thus, changes in the demographics of families and communities have acted as a barrier to self-segregation in the current world.

However, despite the changes in the demographic compositions in families and society, there are some groups which still practice self-segregation. This mostly occurs in the underdeveloped countries which have not benefited from the advancement in technology. These nations are comprised of groups which have a healthy respect for their culture. They fear to interact with other groups in society for fear of losing their traditions. However, with the current rate of technological advancement, self-segregation will not exist in future. People will be able to interact freely with other members of society. Thus, self-segregation phenomenon is facing various threats. Interaction among multiple groups of people is being encouraged to enhance development. Additionally, the emphasis on equality will lead to a decrease in self-segregation. People from different groups will have equal chances of participating in various activities in the society. In the current period, events are being organised to give people an opportunity to interact with other people in the community. Thus, self-segregation is being threatened by various factors in the current world.

In conclusion, self-segregation refers to the process where a particular group of people decide to live independently without the interaction of other people in society. It is a phenomenon which has existed in history. However, its chances of survival are being threatened by various factors in the current world, the leading ones being the advancement in technology, industrialisation and globalisation. There are multiple reasons why some groups of people decide to live independently in society. The main aim is to avoid segregation, which can have adverse effects on their culture. People in isolated groups aim to preserve their traditions and culture. Self-segregation is associated with various benefits like the preservation of culture. However, it has drawbacks like causing conflicts among different groups in the society. Changes in the demographic composition of families and communities have threatened the self-segregation phenomenon (Phillips, 2007). People in the current world have higher chances of interaction. Globalization and industrialization have brought together people from different ethnic groups, thus reducing the chances of self-segregation.

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Self-segregation
As a result, groups should weigh the advantages and demerits of their actions before making decisions related to self-segregation. Self-segregation has been a common trend in the United States. The most common one in history was based on racial differences. Two main ethnic groups have occupied the United States. They constituted of the blacks ...

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