“The trouble with white friends”
“Whether it was their wealth, their beauty or their status, I genuinely thought that proximity to white people would rectify all of my inner turmoil. As such, I thought I felt less comfortable around most black folk, but those feelings were not facts…
Maybe I envy people like Ben Carson or Don Lemon or Raven-Symone. The way I might be jealous of my cats when I’m rushing to leave for work with them staring blankly at me as I close the door, or a baby in a cart in front of me in line at the supermarket when I’m not sure my card will go through. Their minds are so fogged over with white supremacy that they don’t have a care in the world beyond the now…
Many a night, I’ve been screaming “Where y’all at?” like Rihanna when the All Lives Matter crowd is totally silent on the police killing of a white person, even if it’s a 6-year old boy who looks like Macaulay Culkin in his prime. When it’s 1 a.m. and I’m staring at my timeline asking myself “How Sway?!” at the sight of another black man, woman or child murdered or beaten or humiliated, sometimes I can’t help but hear Bill Duke in Menace II Society asking “You know you done fucked up right?,” considering most if not all of the friends I have late night convos going with are white. How many of those nights have I gone to bed furious and dejected because whoever I did talk to just didn’t get it. Only to then go into work the next day and see mostly white faces who definitely don’t get it.”
this picture for this article — that expression is kind of perfect.
I don’t know, it’s the number of friendships that I have where we can talk about anything and extend trust and love and support across all these new unknown parts of adulthood… until it comes to my race identity, when they get an expression and it’s like I’m talking to a stranger who doesn’t know why I’m trying to tell them about my life.
Related: “Friendship and Race and Knowing Your Place”; “Three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends”
