Beyond the “Some of my best friends are black” Syndrome
Dear Crystal,
We’ve decided to ask whether the idea of race (hereafter just “race”), our skin color, has impacted our friendship.
Race has shaped our friendship in profound ways, and continues to. It has been both a blockage that we have had to remove to experience true love. And, in facing it honestly, it has been the vessel that carries and enriches our love.
I first saw you in 2000, in our Introduction to African-American Studies course at Mount Holyoke. It was my second course in the department, and as with the first, in that lecture hall, guided by our brilliant professor, Preston Smith, I knew I’d found my academic passion (investigating how race has shaped American society). I was honest with myself about that even though I was worried how this would be interpreted by others, particularly African-Americans. Basically, I was afflicted with a deep desire to be liked… by everybody. Thus, my interactions with activists and any person of color then were tinged by my desire to be seen as different from the “average white person,” imbued with some sort of moral purity other white people couldn’t or had not yet accessed. This need played out in many twisted, dysfunctional ways.
For instance, halfway into my freshman year my beloved roommate asked archly, “You claim to be such a social justice activist, but do you even have any close black friends?” Our room was decorated with a larger than life sized poster of Bob Marley, an item we affectionately called “Bob”. I scanned the room for other images of people of color. Every framed photo in the room was of white faces, the faces of my close family and friends. The answer to her question was “no.”
Thus began a feverish search to earn the friendship of African-American students on campus. This black-friend-search was combined with introspection about why I didn’t have close black friends even though my hometown, Mount Pleasant, SC, was diverse in terms of white-black population counts. I began to understand that the racial homogeneity of my close friend group was part the result of my life choices and part the result of institutional discrimination like the tracking system that separated me from almost all of my black peers in South Carolina public schools.
The way to address this as a young adult, I thought, was to do the awkward work of seeking black people as friends. So, I started tagging along with two African-American roommates on our hall and their group of friends. I attended events at the Black student union. I made deliberate attempts to engage black peers in conversation. Some of these actions were rooted in my academic major and my genuine interest in the lectures and events I attended. But there was a strong diseased element in many of my interactions then. Namely, they were laced with the hidden hope that these relationships, these Kodak moments with activists and people of color, would secure my moral purity.
After a year of feeling awkward most of the time with these people whose company I sought out in a fundamentally dishonest way, I began to recognize my artifice for what it was and drew back. I was even more disgusted with myself than before my black-friend-search began.
Part of the change was also spurred by the fact that the people I befriended, lovely as they were, had little in common with me. They attended the student union parties, but were not super-interested in discussing race as I was. In other words, it was not a shared interest or hobby or life experience that was connecting us, but my deliberate effort to sculpt a United Colors of Benetton image.
I had not yet begun to shed my self-righteous, false façade when I first met you in Preston’s course (note to reader: he encouraged students to address him by his first name). And indeed, your powerful voice and furrowed brow during class (furrowed in, I guessed, our shared frustration at the history and contemporary data we analyzed together) made you mythical in my mind. You seemed unflappable, an amazing extemporaneous speaker, a beautiful mind, a true activist. In my first memory of you, I see you sitting at the end of the long rectangular table in the 19th century lecture hall where our class was. You often wore a wrap with bright shades of red, yellow, and green, around your hair. The colors and the strands they adorned glowed in the late afternoon light streaming through the room’s many windows. To me then, you were supernatural, divine.
I meanwhile, felt like a shaky-voiced social justice impostor, unattractive and translucent to a woman of your character and moral fortitude. My feelings were moderately cloaked but I was certainly struggling with an obsessive questioning of my role as a white woman in a racist society…So call it white guilt or a cousin of Dubois’s contempt-or-pity syndrome, but I romanticized you and was too intimidated by you to do much more than mumble hello or communicate indirectly through class discussions.
Indeed, although we met in Intro. to Afro-Am. Studies and hung out once through a mutual friend, you and I didn’t begin befriending one another until two years later, 2003-04, our senior year. I forget how we reconnected in 2003, but I’m glad that it was then and not before. You see I had been away from Mount Holyoke during the intervening time. One year I spent out of college, the other at Clemson University, a yawning, good ole’ boy magnet in South Carolina.
The events of my time away matured me a great deal. The powerful love between myself and my then boyfriend that brought me to Clemson soon rotted into a tenuous re-enactment of past exchanges. The relationship’s demise was spurred by my boyfriend’s openly bigoted friends, who I challenged and was rejected by. The rejection was a great gift ultimately, spurring my more honest engagement with the history and contemporary impact of racism in the US. (A favorite quote then was from Alice Walker’s Posessing the Secret of Joy: “If you lie to yourself, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it”). That two year period was also marked by my parents’ separation. The conflict impacted both parents in intensely negative, yet different ways. And for me, it dug grooves into my personality that made me more rooted in who I was before my obsessive self-consciousness.
So in 2004, when you and I began forging a friendship after bumping into each other at several on-campus events, I was meeting you in a more relaxed, honest way. We spent much of that first year at your apartment across from campus, studying and extending class discussions deep into the night. Your presence in my life was a gift from God even then.
Before I met you, no-one I knew wanted to explore how race impacted social, political, and economic life in the US, at length, outside the classroom. In fact, all but a few of my intimates, including my then boyfriend, said the topic was depressing, and made me feel like a killjoy when I brought it up. (In fairness to them, I was extremely self-righteous towards most white people back then). Thus, I felt alienated from almost everybody, fake, restless, resentful, and bored.
When I met you, and when I saw that, like me, you felt joy in dissecting and naming white privilege, institutional racism, inter and intra-discrimination, it was more than camaraderie. I felt a deep sense of relief, spiritual liberation.
One of our early meetings then was at a lecture you organized and emceed. At the event, you shared the intimate story of the FBI’s brutal attack on your family when you were three years old and of your father’s subsequent incarceration, with our college community. The lecture, which included a presentation by your Godmother/your father’s former legal counsel, inspired me deeply.
Your ability to convey your personal history in forceful, compelling detail; to distill academic research into meaningful, clear questions about how we navigate our world, or into poignant critiques of popular worldviews- it ignites my intellect and my heart. You are one of the most moving communicators I’ve met, but you’re engaging beyond your academic passions.
Remember your campaign to make sure Myaisha had the best, most supportive learning environment possible? I do. I remember when you realized that the local public school teachers and administrators were viewing Myaisha, often the only African-American student in the class, through gross, racist generalizations. You pulled her right out.
While double-majoring in African-American Studies and Political Science, you began researching area schools, and surveying parents in the MHC community until you found a private school about 15 minutes from campus that wasn’t perfect, but was much better than the public elementary school down the street. The fact that you didn’t have a car nor the hefty tuition fees the school charged did not daunt you. By securing a mix of loans and scholarship funds, you enrolled Myaisha in McDuffie, again, the most prestigious primary school in the area. I was moved by your indefatigueable spirit, your love for your daughter and your commitment to confronting racism in her school.
Committment to confrontation is something we share, and it has forged and deepened our friendship. Our exchanges have been marked by intense anger and pain, but also by joy, even euphoria. What’s special about our friendship is not that it’s “colorblind” or free of complications, it’s that it uses color-consciousness as a way to recognize and tap our common humanity.
We continue to confess personal and societal flaws to find out why we treat each other wrong as part of learning how to love each other right.
I love you.
Julia
Live By Ubuntu 