40 percent of white people don't have a non-white friend

A new poll from Reuters/Ipsos shows that 40 percent of white people in America don't have a non-white friend, which means everyone knows someone who lied about having a black friend after saying something really dumb and racially insensitive.

About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The figures highlight how segregated the United States remains in the wake of a debate on race sparked by last month's acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of unarmed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. President Barack Obama weighed in after the verdict, calling for Americans to do some "soul searching" on whether they harbor racial prejudice.

Unsurprisingly, those figures change a bit based on geographic region. You'll be astonished to find out which part of America is the most segregated...

As a group, Pacific states - including California, the most populous in the nation - are the most diverse when it comes to love and friendship. By contrast, the South has the lowest percentage of people with more than five acquaintances from races that don't reflect their own.

Some of this is down to precedent. "This country has a pretty long history of restriction on inter-racial contact and for whites and blacks, even though it's in the past, there are still echoes of this," said Ann Morning, an associate professor in the department of sociology at New York University.

"Hispanics and Asian Americans have traditionally had less strict lines about integrating."

Also, your racist-ass grandpas have a profound effect on the data, as younger generations tend to be less segregated than those of oldtimers.

Younger American adults appear to confirm this, according to the poll. About one third of Americans under the age of 30 who have a partner or spouse are in a relationship with someone of a different race, compared to one tenth of Americans over 30. And only one in 10 adults under 30 say no one among their families, friends or coworkers is of a different race, less than half the rate for Americans as a whole.