Sleeping with the enemy

Today we had a lecture from Don Foster, a psychologist who spoke to us about the Contact Hypothesis. South Africa under apartheid was a “non-contact” society, one that believed that contact between different races would cause friction, and was best avoided. The Contact Hypothesis on the other hand, is the idea that if people meet across racial lines, then race relations improve. This contact needs to be within a certain set of conditions, ones where there is a possibility for intimate relationships and cooperative activity. So things like a work environment where there may be a difference in power and no personal connection have been shown to be less correlated with how reconciled a person feels. It increases as the settings get more personal, such as having their children go to the same schools, or having close friends of another race, and mixed marriages.

This conversation, as well as a recently engaged friend, got some of us in the house talking about how we have also dated people who are ideologically/culturally very different than us, and have had many positive experiences. One of the more meaningful relationships I've had was with someone of a different race and religion, with whom I disagreed with on pretty much every issue related to politics and culture. And we cared deeply about each other anyways. That was powerful to me in seeing my capacity to care for people, not just this larger vague idea of humanity.

But once again, that was in a very specific setting. In a culture that is now no longer legally separated, South Africa still is almost completely informally segregated, much like the US. So although it has been shown that those who have more intimate contact with other races feel more reconciled, that contact isn’t occurring.

I keep thinking about romantic relationships because those seem to be something we are most guarded about. Often people can be seemingly liberal about other groups until a family member wants to marry someone from that group. There are also so many other barriers to making intimate relationships with people we see as different from us. I have many friends who would never even consider dating someone outside their culture, language, or religion, because it can be so much more possible to connect with people who can relate to the things that are important to us. Or also the fact that social influences so much shape who we are attracted to in the first place, such as music, fashion, or what is even considered beautiful. These are not separate from the very inequities we are trying to reconcile, that blue eyes and lighter skin tones are considered more beautiful, that expensive clothes are more fashionable. These are issues embedded in our culture but can pass as benign, even though they help reinforce separateness. So what does it really take to allow ourselves to form intimate relationships with those who are different than us?