Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (13 page)

There are other examples that are perhaps not quite so obvious. Issues related to race come up in ways that we don’t always anticipate. My children grew up in western Massachusetts, in the city of Northampton, where we lived for many years prior to my move to Atlanta to become the president of Spelman. When my oldest son was in elementary school, he invited a White child home for an afternoon visit. It was the first time this child had been to our house, but they were friends from school. They were playing a computer game in the basement, seated at the computer, and my husband was within earshot. And he heard the young friend, the visitor, say to my son, “My brother says Black people are stupid.” Our son did not respond to this out-of-the-blue remark. They just kept playing the game; he ignored it. My husband, however, heard the conversation, came up the stairs, and said to me, “Who is that kid and what is he doing in our house?” Although our son had ignored the remark, as parents we had to decide whether we would. (We chose not to ignore it, and shared the incident with the young boy’s father in a parent-to-parent conversation.)
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When you least expect it, the issue of race can emerge, even in a context of friendship.

These dynamics are not limited to the domain of race. Class differences, and the assumptions that accompany them, can also create relational complexities. I remember a friendship that I developed in college with a young African American woman. We had very different class backgrounds. She had grown up in the South Bronx. Although she had attended an elite, predominantly White boarding school in high school through a scholarship program, she came from a low-income neighborhood where all of the families were poor, including hers. I grew up in a middle-class family. My father was a college professor and my mother was a public school teacher. And my view of the world was very much shaped by that class experience, that middle-class experience.

I remember having a conversation with this friend, who told me that when we first met, she had been suspicious of me because I smiled too much. In her view, I was a little too happy. And part of that happiness was the fact that I hadn’t had to struggle in the ways that she’d had to struggle. I also think of a conversation with a fellow student in graduate school, a Black man I did not know well. We were waiting for a bus, and he asked me what I was going to be doing when I finished graduate school. I told him that maybe I would teach, maybe I’d be a psychotherapist. I wasn’t exactly sure. I added, “You know, I just know I don’t ever want to be bored.” And he looked at me and said, “What is your class background?” “What do you mean?” I replied. And he said, “Well, where did you get the idea that work was supposed to be entertaining?” The notion that work should be fulfilling and not just something you do because you have to support yourself or your family or to make ends meet clearly came out of my class background. Class, like race, influences how we view the world, and ultimately influences how we interact with other people.

Sometimes the situations among friends, or potential friends, may be more subtle—communicating that one’s racial status is not to be acknowledged or addressed. One of the writers in Emily Bernard’s book is Trey Ellis, an African American writer who describes himself as a “cultural mulatto.”
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He means by that that he grew up in White neighborhoods and experienced himself as between cultures in many ways. Interestingly, he found that it was more comfortable in some respects to be friends with Jewish classmates, because they were also somewhat on the margin of the mainstream White culture in his school community. In writing about his close adolescent friendship with two Jewish boys in his town, Ellis says this:

An important aspect of who Trey was remained hidden from his friends, seemingly because he didn’t know how to talk to them about it. As in the case of David Mura, an important part of who he was remained invisible to them.

Did these young men have to hide to remain in relationship with their White friends? When they began to actively explore their identity, could their White friends share in that process with them? More often than not the answer to that question is no. To focus on my identity as a person of color inevitably means that it will require my White friend to think about his or her own Whiteness, an act of self-examination that may be uncomfortable to undertake.

It is not uncommon to see White youth and youth of color who have grown up together going their separate ways in adolescence. I think that often it is for exactly this reason: the difficulty in engaging in a conversation about the increased awareness of or experience of encounters with race or racism that the young person of color is beginning to have, on the one hand; and the lack of exploration of their own racial identity that is typical for White youth at that time.

Black teenagers and other youth of color typically begin to explore their racial identity during adolescence, but White youth may wait a long time before they think about what it means to be White. Sometimes they never do. Whether such reflection begins at all is certainly a function of social circumstance and context, and if the context doesn’t require it, it may never occur. (I will say more about the implications of this for schools at the end of this chapter.)

David Mura describes the ending of a friendship he had with a White woman in this way:

The story of cross-racial friendship does not always begin or end in the way that David Mura described. My own story of my friendship with Andrea Ayvazian has been told publicly. We often tell it together.
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Andrea is a White woman of Armenian ancestry who has worked on issues of social justice for a long time. Today, I count her as one of my closest friends. We met in the context of work, just as young people often meet in school. We have known each other for almost twenty years.

We first met as social justice educators. We were both affiliated with an organization that provided “unlearning racism” workshops. We were paired as a biracial team charged with facilitating a multiday workshop at an institution in the Boston area. We both lived in western Massachusetts, and we had to drive two hours together to get to Boston. We would lead the workshop and then drive back. It had been, as we would say, a particularly tough group. And we spent a lot of time over several sessions talking about what we thought had gone well and what had gone wrong, or what we might do differently. We had to strategize together about how we were going to make it better the next time. It was a challenging workshop to do.

Several things are important about this story of how we got to know each other. One is that we met in the context of work. Particularly in adult relationships, that is often how people come together, people working in a shared environment. We still tend to be socially segregated by geography and real estate. Northampton is not a particularly segregated town—the Black population is small and dispersed throughout the community—but Andrea and I did not live in the same neighborhood. We both have children, but our children did not go to the same school. She and I have similar educational backgrounds, but we didn’t go to any of the same colleges or universities. Nothing in particular would have brought us together naturally, except for the context of work. So the workplace is certainly an important place for friendship development, as is the world of higher education, bringing people together whose paths might not otherwise cross.

But another aspect that is important about our relationship is that we began talking about race from the very beginning. In some of the relationships that I have described, race was in the room, but not a subject for discussion. In our case, because of the work we were doing, we had to talk about race from the very beginning. We talked about our own personal experiences with race. We talked to each other and publicly about dealing with challenging racial issues, because that was part of the workshop process. Race was on the table from the very beginning, and I am sure that fact contributed to our ability to connect. We were able to size each other up racially, so to speak, in a very open and overt way.

Yet another factor in this long-term friendship is that when we became friends, we came together not as teacher and learner. Your teacher can be your friend, but on different terms from the kind of relationship that I am describing here. The kind of friendship that gives you those five good things Miller wrote about is really based on mutuality, not on power differential.

Finally, the fact that we were able to come together as equals rather than as teacher and learner in the context of a cross-racial relationship largely had to do with the fact that Andrea had worked on her Whiteness.
I mean something particular about that:
Andrea had thought about what it means to be White in a race-conscious society. She had spent a lot of time prior to our meeting examining her own Whiteness, thinking about what it meant to have privilege, about what it meant to be in a relationship with those who might not have the same privileges. I did not feel, as a person of color, that I needed to teach her what you might call the first things about race. We both had things to learn in our friendship, and over the years we have taught each other many lessons, but we had both done internal work on understanding our racial identities, and the lessons learned were, I would say, in balance.

Bill Ayers, a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, articulately describes a different dynamic in a friendship with an older Black activist he knew in the 1960s, much earlier in his life. Looking back on the relationship, he writes:

Reciprocity is important, but there is something else that is also required, and that is the ability to navigate conflict. In friendships, conflict is inevitable, and even when we don’t intend for it to be so, those conflicts often have racial meaning. We have to be willing to name that meaning when we see it. When we don’t, disconnection is often the result.

Emily Bernard gives an example of the cost of racial silence in a friendship. Describing what happened between her and Susan, a White friend whom she loved, Bernard writes:

Not being able to talk about the significance of race when you see it leads to disconnection.