As Jones writes in
The Atlantic, Americans' segregated social circles have influenced responses to the events in Ferguson, Missouri, over the past few weeks. Polls show deep divides between blacks and whites on topics from the role of race in Ferguson to the propriety of responses by protesters and police.
The numbers above offer insight into why so many whites have expressed bafflement over protesters' responses to the shooting of Michael Brown. The history between many black communities and the police forces that serve them is long, complicated, often violent, and characterised by an extreme imbalance of power. But as Jones notes, most whites are not "socially positioned" to understand this history, simply because they know few people who've experienced it.
To be fair, the numbers suggest there is plenty of racial self-selection in black Americans' friend networks, too. But focusing solely on black-white relations, there's a pretty big difference between having only one member of a given race in your friend network, and having eight of them.
In fact, PRRI's data show that a full 75 per cent of whites have "entirely white social networks without any minority presence." The same holds true for slightly less than two-thirds of black Americans.
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