The Work of Friendship
The strangest story I’ve read in a while is that of the all-White birthday party described in Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s excerpt, “There’s a Divide in Even the Closest Interracial Friendships. Including ours,” from their new book Big Friendship. Friedman, who is White, “had offered up her patio as the venue for a friend’s birthday party,” but had not made the guest list herself. The friend whose birthday it was, also White, invited only White people to celebrate with her. Or White/White-passing guests were the only ones who showed up. Apart, that is, from Sow, who is Black.
Aminatou was thrown off guard. It felt surreal to be at a gathering like this. She knew Ann didn’t only have white friends, yet here Aminatou was, scanning the yard for the slightest hint of melanin. Nothing. Not even a racially ambiguous tan. Could this really be possible? After all these years of knowing Ann? Why was Aminatou the only Black person at this party? She was screaming inside: Where are your Black friends?
Realizing she was the only Black person at the party caused Sow to “panic.” Much of the piece unpacks how upsetting the homogeneous birthday party was to Sow, both in the moment and in the months that followed. How had Friedman let this happen? How had Friedman not thought to bring it up with Sow and take responsibility for the all-White space she’d hosted?
Aminatou believed that if one of their friends had come to her and Ann about a similar situation, Ann would have risen to the occasion. Ann would have asked the white person to take a long, critical look at the decisions that led them to have no Black friends present at such a large gathering.
What ended up happening: Friedman first got defensive, or maybe defended herself, pointing out that she had not invited these guests to begin with, but eventually did the work and learned why her friend was so shattered. The message the two come away with from the incident:
“Race is not a challenge to overcome. It’s something to be constantly aware of.”
And yet: if you believe you have to treat friendships with people of other races as a complicated and arduous process, this inhibits forming or maintaining interracial friendships… thereby increasing the likelihood of monochromatic social gatherings. Gatherings, that is, like that birthday party.
The excerpt presents friendship as the sort of relationship about which a person might go not so much to couples counseling but HR: “We had discussed plenty of times how disgraceful it was for people to plan or participate in all-white panels at professional conferences. … A birthday party isn’t a professional event, but the point still stands.”
It’s not clear from the piece what if anything the authors think differentiates a social gathering from a professional conference. Labor metaphors — or are they even metaphors? — abound.
“All friendships require both people to work hard to understand the differences between them,” they explain, adding, “Aminatou wants Ann to acknowledge the work that comes with being friends with a white person. And to do more work herself: to not just recognize that racist stereotypes exist but account for them without Aminatou having to point out that they are present in our interactions.” Oh and also: “Interracial friendship requires different skills from each person.”
Happy relationships tend not to feel like work. (Think of the expression, ‘we’re working on our marriage.’) Life tends to throw enough work, paid and otherwise, at all of us that time off sort of has to be spent, well, off. You keep in your life the people who, on the whole, bring more joy than stress. The friendship as described in this excerpt sounds pretty joyless.
This doesn’t mean that within the context of a friendship, identity differences cease to even come up, or that difficult conversations should never happen. One advantage of having friends of different backgrounds is that without even thinking about it, you’re alerted to perspectives on the world you don’t share, both relative oppression and relative ease. If a friend shares an experience of being discriminated against or insulted — by anyone, including you — then by all means listen! Do not gaze into the distance and explain that in an ideal world, humans would not be divided by race, creed, or gender. But this is different from an ongoing project where you never for a moment forget where you and your friends fit in all the privilege hierarchies. It’s possible to avoid being awful without landing on some of my best friends are homework.
But the biggest mystery of the story, for me, was what Sow gets out of her friendship with Friedman. The asymmetry of “learning experience” the authors describe does add up — the have-not will generally know more about the have than vice versa. One hopes that elsewhere in the book itself, the friendship’s redeeming features get a mention.
