By Christopher Ingraham
The Washington Post
"All my black friends have a bunch of white friends. And all my white friends have one black friend."
That's the memorable punchline of a Chris Rock bit from 2009 on interracial friendships. And according to some recent number-crunching by Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, there's a good deal of truth to that statement.
Let's consider the average American white American and the average American black American, and let's say, for simplicity's sake, that each of them have 100 friends. If you were to break down their respective friend networks by race, they would look something like this.
black-friends-white-friends
If you're interested in how PRRI arrived at these numbers, see the methodological note at the bottom of this post.
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.
Going back to Chris Rock's point, the average black person's friend network is 8 percent white, but the average white person's network is only 1 percent black. To put it another way: Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.
There are a number of factors driving these numbers. Simple population counts are one of them: there are more white people than black people in the U.S., so it makes sense that the average American is going to have more white friends than black friends.
Another factor is our tendency to seek out and associate with people who are similar to us in any number of ways - religiously, politically, economically and yes, racially too. The polite term for this phenomenon is "sorting," and it impacts everything from political polarization to income inequality to the racial differences in friend networks seen above.
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