Cross-group friendships, the irony of harmony, and the social construction of “discrimination”

ABSTRACT

Cross-group friendships are often assumed to be a panacea to intergroup conflict. However, the irony of harmony hypothesis suggests that friendships can have negative consequences for collective action and social change. We complement this research with accounts of cross-group friendship, using interviews and focus groups with minority (African-Caribbean and/ or gay) and majority (White and/ or heterosexual) participants (n = 54). Participants repeatedly deployed “friendship” as an idealized category such that what happened within friendship could not be constructed as discrimination. Majority participants said that anything that happened within friendship could only be a mistake/ misunderstanding that would be easy to rectify. Minority participants struggled to reconcile the category entitlements of friendship with the problematic experiences that they described, but constructing such experiences as “discrimination” presented practical, moral, and rhetorical difficulties. Harmonious cross-group friendship may therefore require that minorities become tolerant to discrimination, while simultaneously enabling majorities to warrant (ill-informed) claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• racism
• homophobia
• stigma
• contact
• discourse

Acknowledgements

We thank Michelle Caldwell and Georgia West for their assistance with the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Katy Greenland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0096-2851

Martha Augoustinos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7212-1499

Eleni Andreouli http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2182-5549

Notes

1. By “minority” and “majority” we mean people who identify as members of groups which have been historically, politically, socially, and/or economically disadvantaged or advantaged. These categories are not fixed but socially constructed, intersectional, and context specific. Thus, although we use the terms “majority” and “minority” participants in the text, we wish to be clear that these categories are not fixed, but rather the categories through which participants were speaking at the time (see also “current research”). This is important because research can inadvertently reify and reproduce essentialised categories of ethnicity, gender, and others (see Howarth 2009).

2. Nevertheless, these positions are not wholly fluid either: the categorization of social groups and the meaning ascribed to groups is closely linked to the operation of power (Link and Phelan 2001).

Additional information

Funding

Parts of the data collection were funded by Economic and Social Research Council studentships awarded to Richard Taulke-Johnson and Constantino Dumangane Jr [grant number ES/I902023/1].