Interracial Friendship Essay

I. INTRODUCTION:

The demographic of university students in South Africa has become quite racially diverse, providing the opportunity for students to engage meaningfully with various other students from different races. Some students make an active effort to meet and befriend diverse people, while other students maintain a relatively homogenous circle of friends and acquaintances. In general, when students form friendships with individuals from different races than themselves, it is most likely that they will share a common experience of interracial friendships. When these experiences are studied, it can provide a deeper understanding of the nature and essence of interracial friendships on campus. Thus, this transcendental phenomenological

This definition provides the aim of the study, namely to describe the essence of students’ cross-racial friendships.

(c) Literature review:

Factors such as the history of apartheid, prejudice, discrimination, and major differences in language, religion, and culture has been identified as barriers to meaningful interracial interaction (Rose & Firmin, 2013). In addition, students are often ignorant and unfamiliar with other ethnicities and cultures (Pundt, 2004). Due to these negative factors, students are more likely to initiate and engage in a friendship with someone from their own race, than they are to befriend someone who is from a different race (Vaquera & Kao, 2008). However, alternative research suggests that students being in close proximity to one another in a close-knit environment, such as on a university campus, will be more likely to form interracial friendships than when they are “out in the world” (Rose & Firmin, 2013; Craig-Henderson, 2011). Research shows that students still see universities as segregated, but only in small instances, such as individual networks of friends (Pundt,