Race Relations in the United States: What We Have is a Failure to Communicate

          Although certain people groups have lived side by side in the United States for centuries, generally speaking, very little meaningful interaction has occurred between them.[1] This observation was certainly true during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement,[2] and unfortunately remains a factor in the early twenty-first century as well. For example, a 2016 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) Survey determined:

Fully three-quarters (75%) of white Americans report that the network of people with whom they discuss important matters is entirely white, with no minority presence. . . . Approximately two-thirds (65%) of black Americans report having a core social network that is composed entirely of people who are also black. . . . Less than half (46%) of Hispanics report that their social network includes only other people who also identify as Hispanic. . . .[3]

These problematic numbers reflect one of the most enduring problems of race relations in the United States.
If a significant percentage of individuals from any given people group does not communicate with individuals from other ethnic groups, they will never know what others think, what issues are important to them, or how they arrive at the conclusions they reach. The obvious result of this substandard approach to intercommunication is poor relations. This arrangement also forces people to fabricate straw man understandings of the positions and concerns they presume differing ethnic groups hold. The bitter fruit of this approach is the construction of barriers that are even more difficult to penetrate because people tend not to realize that they exist. Communication is necessary to dismantle these barricades, but it is easier to talk about this necessity than to put it into practice.
What can we do to change these tragic statistics? How have you engaged people from other ethnic groups to tackle the tough issues? Post your responses here!



[1] Lance Lewis, “Black Pastoral Leadership and Church Planting,” Aliens in the Promised Land: Why Minority Leadership is Overlooked in White Churches and Institutions (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2013), 34.
[2] John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, with an afterword by Robert Bonazzi (New York: New American Library, 2003), 1.
[3] Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-River, Robert P. Jones, “Race, Religion, and Political Affiliation of Americans’ Core Social Networks,” https://www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politics-americans-social-networks/ Public Religion Research Institute (accessed December 11, 2017).

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