Free NurtureShock by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

a diverse neighborhood when they grow up, about 70% of the nonwhite high school juniors said they wanted to. But only 35%
     of whites wanted to.
    Dr. Walter Stephan, a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University, made it his life’s work to survey students’ racial
     attitudes after their first year of desegregation. He found that in 16% of the desegregated schools examined, the attitudes
     of whites toward African Americans became more favorable. In 36% of the schools, there was no difference. In 48% of the schools,
     white students’ attitudes toward blacks became
worse
. Stephan is no segregationist—he signed the amicus brief, and he is one of the most respected scholars in the field.
    The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don’t necessarily lead to more cross-race friendships. Often it’s the
     opposite.
    Duke University’s Dr. James Moody—an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks—analyzed data on over 90,000
     teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male
     friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each of her named
     friends, then Moody compared the number of each student’s cross-racial friendships with the school’s overall diversity.
    Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and
     thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes
down
.
    As a result, junior high and high school children in diverse schools experience two completely-contrasting social cues on
     a daily basis. The first cue is inspiring—that many students have a friend of another race. The second cue is tragic—that
     far
more
kids just like to hang with their own. It’s this second dynamic that becomes more and more visible as overall school diversity
     goes up. As a child circulates through school, she sees more groups that her race disqualifies her from, more tables in the
     lunchroom she can’t sit at, and more implicit lines that are taboo to cross. This is unmissable even if she, personally, has
     friends of other races.
    It’s true that, for every extracurricular one kid has in common with a child of another race, the likelihood that they will
     be friends increases. But what’s stunning about Moody’s analysis is that he’s taken that into account: Moody included statistical
     controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate)
     students within the school. And the rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division between students.
    Having done its own analysis of teen friendships, a team from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, confirmed Moody’s
     assessment. “More diverse schools have, overall, more potential interracial contact and hence more interracial dyads of ‘potential’
     friends,” these researchers explained—but this opportunity was being squandered: “The probability of interracial dyads being
     friends decreases in more diverse schools.”
    Those increased opportunities to interact are
also,
effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what’s happening.
    “There has been a new resegregation among youth in primary and secondary schools and on college campuses across the country,”
     wrote Dr. Brendesha Tynes of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Tynes concluded, “Even in multiracial schools,
     once young people leave the classroom very little interrracial discussion takes place because a desire to associate with one’s
     own ethnic group often discourages interaction between groups.”
    All told, the odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8%. Those odds barely
     improve for the second-best friend, or the third best,