RACE EFFECTS ON FRIEND CHOICES

By Ziyad Ansari

Edited by Eman Nadeem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people believe that everybody should be treated fairly. It is an opinion which is taken up by people who are a race which is discriminated or has been discriminated in the past. Often young children in school are aware of this angle. They tend to choose friends based on how they feel towards them rather than their skin color or their nationality. But it has been researched that as they get older, race tends to play a part in choice of friends and peer groups, especially in teenagers. Supposedly, if one child has a history of being racist towards others, they might feel biased towards people of their own race and feel inclined to disrespect people of a different race. This type of situation normally happens among peers in international schools or multicultural schools who are normally used to being alongside so-called “white” people. I have decided to talk about this topic as I have observed in my school that there is a domination of peer groups which have mixed race rather than one race or nationality. What I have observed that the Pakistani students tend to stick together in break and Arab students also tend to stick together. However, I have also observed that the girls have different peer groups and none of them depend on race, rather they have diversity in their groups.

 

Even though this problem makes the discriminated child feel unhappy, it can be said that you cannot blame children for doing it. It is understandable that they might feel more comfortable with people from their own nationality or race, especially if they are a new student who have come from outside of the country. In a recent AIS-R (American International School of Riyadh) survey taken, results showed that 49% of students’ peer groups consist mainly of people of the same race. This means that nearly half of the students at an International middle school would prefer to befriend people who might speak the same language, or have the same culture as them. One might also believe that, even if a child is of the same nationality, if the color of their skin is different they belong with that race’s peer group. It should also be taken into consideration that this survey was taken in a school whose code of conduct and rules promote the act of accepting and respecting cultural differences and general differences. “Currently there is a lot of research on discrimination, but the vast majority of research suggests that individuals are most often or can only be discriminated against by people of a different race”, a Ph.D student who is studying racism at University of Virginia stated. One might even racially insult somebody verbally, rather than bullying them physically.

 

It must also be said that how the discriminated child feels is an important factor. If they are excluded from a group they might feel isolated and as if they are not liked among their peers. This is shown in the results from the same recent AIS-R survey. It showed that 33% of students had been excluded from a group due to racial discrimination. This would mean that ⅓ of an entire middle school will have been racially discriminated in their life. This survey was taken from a school which contains mostly Arab students, but there are a reasonable amount of Asian students as well.

 

There may even be other reasons for a child to be excluded, such as religion or nationality. For example, in AIS-R, I have constantly heard Arab students referring to Jews and bad-mouthing them. If somebody does something unnatural, they say something insulting Jews to express the situation. Obviously this negative view on Jews might be fuelled by some anger from the Palestinian and Jordanian students due to the conflict between their countries and Israel, and this causes them to hate Jews, but I believe that if somebody new came to the school made friends with people and then told everybody that he was a Jew, he would become hated among the a small portion of AIS-R peers. Similarly, the same thing would probably occur when a student from a country which is not very common among other peers’ nationalities, there might be some exclusion due to a lack of knowledge in the country or due to children not knowing who the student is or what to expect from their behavior. I know this type of thing happens due to personal experience in a previous school I went to.

 

That said, I can say that race plays a part when it comes to selection of peer groups but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing and students have their freedom to choose who they want to befriend. It can be that they would like to be with students of their own race, even though this does not mean that you must exclude other children who are of a different race from joining the peer group. This is a growing problem and it is disrespectful and must be stopped.