Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
I Became Friends With A White Woman. Then 1 Cringeworthy Conversation Changed Our Relationship Forever.
"I watched Kim’s mouth continue to move while my stomach turned to jelly. Oh no."
according to the Public Religion Research Institute, 75% of white people have no friends of color, a statistic I find both startling and consistent with my experience. Typically, building interracial friendships means that both parties need to put in work. Both need to step outside their respective comfort zones to learn and embrace a culture with which they may not be familiar. Ideally, that means my white girlfriends and I would spend equal time in each other’s worlds, acquainting ourselves with things like the other’s music, food, news and fashion.
But that’s rarely how it goes.
Mostly, it’s just me, meeting my white friends at white restaurants, discussing white TV shows on our group texts, and going to white book events in white parts of town. Rarely do they choose films like Ava Duvernay’s “Origin” or suggest going to a reading by a Black author like Ashley C. Ford. And as the Black, female TikTok creator @bannebean posted recently on this topic, “I’m getting tired of having to be in white spaces to maintain the friendship.”
Like the old adage about the tree falling in the forest, I wonder if an interracial friendship that takes place only in white spaces is a true friendship. The assumption is that your Black friend is comfortable everywhere you are, when they may just have more practice at being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Being Black in white spaces comes at a cost, and it seems Black people are always expected to foot the bill.
I met Lilah almost 15 years ago.