Article: It’s the Message, Not the Messenger: The Declining Significance of Black-White Contact in a “Colorblind” Society. Sociological Inquiry, August 2007.
Summary: Eileen O’Brien and Kathleen Odell Korgen each had two separate projects: O’Brien studied a group of white antiracist activists and Korgen studied black-white friendship pairs. When they brought their data together, they found they made for an interesting comparison. Contrary to the expectations of contact theory, whites with close black friends did not have strong anti-racist views and those whites participating in antiracism activism did not necessarily have many close black friends. 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.
UPDATE: This Discovery was published in our Winter 2008 issue.