What It Really Means To Be The Black Friend
/It’s a phrase as old as equality in this country— and hollow like it too—“I have black a friend…” From the minute they pretended to let us into the house for dinner it has been a point for them that we’ve accepted the invitation. Never mind that the dinner has no salt and…NVM. While we sit under the kiddie table in this country, our existence is appropriated and trotted out for all sorts of ceremonial blessings. There’s the “we need you to saaaang a little for us” ceremony that serves as a white guilt baptism—“Let us all be washed in good intentions!” The first-time-you-let-me-say-nigga-so-I-can-super-saiyan-my-whiteness-via-blackness” hood pass ceremony of privilege and flex. Even better these ceremonies only really need one black person. They are coordinated as extensions of isolation and erasure, which spins itself into a jig of having multiple black “friends”. This is all to serve as a reprint of the true jux of America: all you niggas are alike.
In conversations with people of color the problematic issue of having White Friends comes up often. Only in these truly safe spaces can one discuss the real horror of being Brad’s Best Hope and Excuse for Curing Ignorance. When you graduate from the School of Most Trusted Darkie, the first lesson you remember is silence. No matter what blackness you are adding to the White Friend’s life, they expect silence about all else that doesn’t concern them. Whatever commonality you guys share, they have immediately taken that as reason to believe you are just like them. Just think: when has a white person ever met a white person just like them that wasn’t <i>just like them</i>? A friend explained as such: “when someone has no experience with other backgrounds, anything you have in common with them immediately makes them think you obviously share the same background as them.” So here you are trapped. You were simply trying to find common ground and you’ve been latched on to. But that common ground is all you stand on. If you veer off this cliff, a world of stereotypes awaits you. The White Friend that loves you because you both enjoy giving men shit will still touch your hair and ask you to teach them how to dance. They are well aware that you are not equal because all this is the fattening of the lamb. You are loved but constantly reminded of being other--kept in a stable out back if the metaphor continues, because your true purpose is to be sacrificed.
The black friend lives as a failsafe excuse. It’s the reason you arrive at brunch 30 minutes late because you are the only friend who can’t exactly just wear bedhead out. The reason you go to dinner parties high or just a bit tipsy so you can grit your teeth through an evening of nobody that looks like you. The reason you sometimes flake out on hanging out with your White Boyfriend’s Friends. You are alone in the room. To be the Black Friend is to be an island. Your inclusion is singular to insure the safety of the White Friend. They don’t want you to have a consensus, a side of the room. You must be the standalone representative because to bring in more than one of you is to destroy the monolith. Being black is so much more complex to those who are not if it has to be explored as individuality. The White Friend does not want to go to dinner at your house or your black friends’ houses. The Black Friend’s family might be too similar to theirs--or worse, they want to come over so they can erase the idea that you are different. What if you have a snobby aunt and a witty mother? What if you have a hippie uncle or a military father? This would force the White Friend to think that maybe you are not the only example. It might mean that maybe other blacks don’t look/speak/think/live like you and that would make a lie of their eventual argument of having a black friend; a lie of the generalization.
Accepting that we are as multi-faceted as any other human life form is not impossible it’s just too risky. Your White Friend is not so dumb that they can’t imagine you are a human they simply don’t have to. The world exists to erase anything beneath the white supremacy so your White Friend can terrorize you by treating you like their other white friends. They can torture you with racist slander that they intended as a joke. They can have inappropriate conversations with you about their delusions that you are trying to steal their boyfriend. <i>(Lifehack: you are not allowed to bring up the fact that he’s the one harassing and physically imposing himself on you regularly. Your white friend will not suddenly remember that she is a feminist first.)</i> Conversations where they attack your person and spirit with passive aggressive questions about your beliefs and judgment. Your White Friend makes it so that every time you have to go anywhere with them in public you expect to be outnumbered and eventually cornered. You have to check for your wallet, keys, phone, language, and ideas when you leave the house. Will one of their friends bring up the latest police murder hashtag while gleefully playing the devil’s advocate? (You will never know if that piece of shit did it because you were in attendance but that’s the point isn’t it?) Or will your White Friend make a remark about how you are the realest/sassiest/fiercest/take-no-shittest person they know?
Shit is like Tom tryina get past all the sleeping dogs in the backyard Jerry just tricked him into. But unlike Jerry who was running to save his life, your White Friend will deny any knowledge of this setup. Their friends are a little boring/ignorant/stupid or, personal favorite, “not like them”. Yes, after all this the White Friend will ask you to absolve them via individuality. Ironic, I know but white people are the self-proclaimed kings of tragic irony. If you allow me to continue that Tom and Jerry metaphor: your White Friend won’t say it but they set up you up because they were scared too. Scared of reality and all that it means. The real danger in falling for this is that it creates a space for the attacks to come from more than just their friends. The White Friend does not have your back and that translates from not backing you in an argument at the bar to turning on you with just as much viciousness when you threaten their white space. You’ve already signed a pre-nup of silence you can’t just go around adding Blackness wherever you want. If you’re the black nerd, the black chubby girl, the light-like-us, the bro-by-us, the sassy birdmother you cannot move between them all. Once you’ve been placed there is no mobility. Every time you don’t act like what is expected of you, you are fucking up and anything that comes out of that is yours to handle alone.
So do all your white girl friends like you because you don’t call them a slut when you’re angry and they think their boyfriend thinks you’re ugly? Are they all filling a quota? There’s no part of my ego that would ever attempt to answer that for you because you’re an individual human in this world. The truth in this is only to speak to the false evidence used as manipulation; the black friend that conveniently smoothes out the conversation by providing mercy and proof with just a mention. The god-like all-access pass that works so well you don’t even need to have the Black Friend present—we believe you white man! It’s not easy being the Black Friend or any Non-White Friend honestly. From the expectation of hypermasculinity from black males, to the sexual sterilization of brown and Asian men it’s all fucked. But in America the Black Friend serves as a priority counterpoint. After all it was all the black “friends” that built this country, but we had a different title then and nobody had to make their White Friend apologize. These days, there is even reward in making your White Friend apologize to your Black Friend. It’s never really an apology just a good speech –to you only, of course—about the awfulness of it all. The Black Friend boils down to a sage stick for white guilt and everybody knows white guilt is the most boring thing in the world. A tedious magic trick involving smoke and mirrors so that white people are never looking at their own reflection, but rather they distort yours. It’s a circus act but the Black Friend still exists, cringing at chain emails and praying for the summer when they’ll #actually bring their #squad to the tailgate or finally stop getting those invites at all.