‘…but some of my best friends are black’

If you think spending time with diverse friends keeps your prejudices in check, Eileen O’Brien and Kathleen Odell Korgen might encourage you to think again.

Face-to-face contact can challenge racial prejudice by forcing us to re-think our beliefs about racial groups based on relationships with individual members of those groups. However, O’Brien and Odell Korgen argue that America’s “colorblind” ideology can actually make interracial interaction have the opposite effect (Sociological Inquiry, August 2007).

The authors interviewed whites who have close black friends and whites participating in anti-racism activism. Traditional “contact theory” would predict that whites with black friends would have strong anti-racist views, and that anti-racism activists would have close personal ties to blacks.

The authors actually found the opposite for each group. They attribute this finding to colorblind attitudes. “Colorblindness” encourages Americans to treat all people purely as individuals and not as members of racial or ethnic groups. As a result, their respondents didn’t re-evaluate their view of a racial group after positive individual contact: they simply exempted that individual from what they thought about the racial group.

Perhaps the surest route to challenging racist stereotypes is to, well, challenge racist stereotypes—no matter how many black friends you have. J.S.

unnecessary roughness

Kids get plenty of benefits from playing team sports, but some sports seem to create more violent kids outside the locker room.

In a recent study of adolescent males, Derek A. Kreager (American Sociological Review, October 2007) found that boys who play football are 41 percent more likely to get into a serious physical fight than their non-athletic peers. For wrestlers, it’s 45 percent. These patterns hold even after controlling for a host of background factors, including past violence and delinquency.

Not only are football players more likely to fight, but so are their friends. Peer group influence, on top of playing sports, affects the likelihood of getting into a serious physical fight. At the same time, playing tennis, a non-contact, less stereotypically masculine sport, decreases the risk of fighting by 35 percent.

These findings have paradoxical implications for how schools treat and view their athletes. On the one hand, as Kreager says, communities expect their athletes to set a standard and act in conventional ways; on the other, they put athletes in situations that “support violence as a means of attaining ‘battlefield’ victories, increasing peer status, and asserting ‘warrior’ identities.” H.M.

richer is better

Being smart might make you healthier. But being rich is even better.

Bruce Link and colleagues (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, March 2008) report that socioeconomic status trumps intelligence when predicting better health, a finding that provides new fodder for public debate about the underlying causes of health disparities.

We need some degree of mental agility to make sense of the barrage of medical information we receive everyday from the news, Internet, and pharmaceutical commercials. However, Link and his co-authors found intelligence had little to no effect on health outcomes when they took income and education into account.

Rather, the underlying causes of better health remain the resources bestowed on those with higher socioeconomic standing, such as more money, more power, and more friends with medical expertise. These people also tend to live in neighborhoods with less pollution, less crime, and better gyms and parks.

If intelligence isn’t the missing link on the road to better health, then initiatives like consumer-based healthcare miss the mark. Drawing upon our wits to sort through complicated health options may have little impact if we can’t afford screening tests or ask the neighborhood doc for friendly advice. W.L.