Professor Elizabeth Aries of the Psychology Department is about to release a new book entitled Race and Class Matters at an Elite College.  In anticipation, the magazine Inside Higher Ed asked her a few questions.

One interesting tidbit:

Many whites tend to see black students to be self-segregating. When black friends eat together at tables in the dining hall, or hang out together in groups, whites take notice. Yet no one comments on the tables of whites eating together in the dining hall or on whites hanging out together on campus. The students showing the greatest degree of self-segregation are white. White students reported on average that two-thirds of their close friends were white, but only a third of black students’ close friends were black.

I’m not a statistician, but is this really all that suprising?  Black students only comprise roughly 10% of the student body.  On the other hand, white students make up about 62%.  Let’s say every student - white or black - has 10 close friends selected randomly across the student body.  On average, 6 friends would be white and 1 would be black.  So when Professor Aries tell us that white students report on average that two-thirds of their close friends are white, she fails to mention this number’s consistency with the breakdown of the larger student body.  On the other hand, a third is considerably more than 10%.

To be fair, I have not read the book.  I’m certain that Professor Aries explains this important finding with detail to statistical analysis this interview did not allow.