Life Kit - How Race And Racism Affect Our Friendships

Episode Date: February 1, 2020

How do race and racism affect our friendships? In this special episode, NPR's Code Switch team and WNYC's Death, Sex & Money podcast answer your questions on race and friendship. Be a good friend and listen.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi there, I'm Alison Aubrey. I host a lot of the health episodes of Life Kit. We wanted to bring you a special episode from our friends at NPR's Code Switch team. They answer listener questions about race and friendship. It's got a lot of insightful information and we thought it would be useful for Life Kit listeners. Enjoy. If this friendship existed in a vacuum, this would be perfect. She said that I segregate my friends. And I was like, hmm. Like my friend isn't racist, but she's not anti-racist. Okay, it's fine that you wear hoop earrings and you get your hair abraded. Like that's not a huge deal, but this is a huge deal. I don't want her to feel like it's a judgment coming from me necessarily. I feel like

the friendship has deteriorated. Gene. What's good, Shereen? A lot of things had to happen in the universe so that you and I could be friends. Say more. Stars had to align. Planets had to shift. And when I say friends, by the way,

I don't just mean coworkers. I mean friends. Oh, we're a miracle. We are a miracle. We do all the friend things. We text all the time. We hang out when we're in the same city. When we're a miracle. We are a miracle. We do all the friend things. We text all the time. We hang out when we're in the same city. When we're in the same place.

Or at least we try to. I'm not going to bring up the fact that you and Nico flaked on me and Kay when we were out in the Bay. I'm going to bring it up. That was the holidays and there's family obligations. Also, you and Kay gave us the tiniest window of availability. It was like a 20- minute window on a random Monday. You made it so hard. I mean, we can't help it if we got

busy social calendar days. Plus, y'all were in San Jose a minute away. Yeah, that was true. That was fun. We were willing to make that trip for you. Whatever. As you all can see, we even fight like friends. Friends. And that's when you really know a friendship is real friends forever

yeah that's shop to save by the bell all right so yes the universe and the stars had to align a certain way just for us to be friends because the data show that cross-racial friendships or interracial friendships are just not that common for those of you who are new to Code Switch, I'm black, obviously. I hope it's obvious. And Shireen contains multitudes. Guess what I am. If you can't guess by my voice, I'm Iranian and Puerto Rican.

And you're all listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Shireen Marisol Mirage. And I'm Gene Dempe. This is an episode from our regular series, Ask Code Switch, where we try, at least with the help of experts, we're not just out here freestyling and making stuff up. We try to help our audience better navigate the various ways that race and its evil play cousin racism

Evil play cousin. affect our lives. And the theme of this week's Ask CoSwitch is race and friendship. We live in a crazy time where Dr. King and Mr. Mandela's dreams are coming true. And black people and white people and Asians and Indians and everybody's hanging out together. They have interracial posses. It's unbelievable what's going on, man. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. All my black friends have a bunch of white friends. And all my white friends have one black friend. That part of Chris Rock's stand-up that you just heard was used in a Washington Post article from a few years back to highlight a pretty shocking statistic from a study done by Robert P. Jones at the Public Religion Research Institute. Yeah, it's a study you bring up a lot. I do. In a lot of code switch meetings. And the takeaway from the study is basically white

Americans have mostly white friends. Yep. 75% of white Americans have entirely white social networks. No people of color at all. Zero. None. And black people are eight times more likely to have a white friend. But black people's social networks are pretty homogenous, too. The very low rates of interracial friendships for whites and blacks is it's pretty alarming. Grace Cao is a Yale sociologist, Jean. She studies interracial relationships, both romantic and platonic. And she also found that white Americans and black Americans tend to have the fewest cross-racial friendships. Her new book, The Company We Keep, came out in 2019. And to write it, she and her co-authors analyzed a huge data set from over 100 schools across the United States. And students were surveyed as adolescents in the mid-90s and then again as young adults in 2008.

What we say about this group of kids at this point in time is generalizable to the entire U.S. And for those of you who are wondering right now why so much of this data seems like it's black and white, Grace's research actually includes multiracial people, Latinx folks, and Asians. And Grace found that Asians are more likely to have cross-racial friendships. It's a lot easier just by chance for an Asian kid to have a friend that's not Asian. I think that's an artifact of just being such a small number in the typical American school and also in the U.S. as a whole. And the Latinx students in the data set who are considered, quote unquote, white Hispanics were the most likely to have friends of another race.

But I want to remind you that, of course, they did not look good in terms of just the odds of having a friend. Wait, wait, wait. What? I know. OK. So to use the government's language, white Hispanics are the most likely to have actual cross-race friendships if they have a friend. If they have a friend. Right. And what Grace told me was what alarmed her maybe more than the fact that white and black students tended to have so few friends of a different race was the fact that kids who said they had no friends at all were disproportionately kids of color, black, Asian and Latinx. Wow. There's just this real sense of isolation and not being accepted by kids at school, that's a real problem. How awful is it to have to go to school every day and not have a single friend? And in case you're wondering,

because I was, according to Grace's research, white girls are the most likely to have friends, followed by white boys. I would say it's less than 10% of white girls that can't name a single friend at school. But for black, Hispanic, and Asian males, it's more like 30%. And do you have those numbers for black, Hispanic, and Asian girls? Yes. They're better, but they're not as good as the white girls. Yes, they're better, but they're not as good as the white girls. So for black, Hispanic and Asian girls, it's more like 20 percent. So why is the data breaking down this way? Well, Grace is a quantitative researcher. She's the person who says, we're observing this phenomenon.

Even though the country is getting more diverse, people still have homogenous social networks. Let's see if the numbers bear that out. And Grace and her colleagues found that, yes, the numbers do bear that out. They did find that the more diverse a school was, the more likely the kids surveyed would go on to have cross-racial friendships as adults, even the ones who didn't have those kinds of friendships as kids. As for the why? I could guess, but, you know, like we don't actually, you know, there's a trade-off, right? You can either talk to people and get really detailed information, but then you talk to 10 people, or you can study 90,000 people and you can't talk to any of them. So unlike Grace, I am a qualitative researcher. That's Beverly Daniel Tatum.

She's a psychologist and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and other conversations about race. And so I have done lots of interviews with not nearly as many as she's got in terms of her numbers, very impressive data set that she has. But friendship is largely determined by proximity. You know, you get to know the people who are nearby. For the black person who grows up in a largely black environment, it's not a surprise that that's their social network

and how they spend their time outside of the workspace, you know, probably attending, if they attend church, a historically black church. The same would be true for a white person who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood or almost entirely white neighborhood, likely to have a very white social network. But for those people who live in racially mixed communities and have that experience growing up, attending a diverse school, living in a racially mixed neighborhood, they are much more likely to have a diverse group of friends than those who have not had that experience.

You know, you become comfortable in a mixed environment if that's what you've grown up in and it doesn't seem odd to you. I'm very dramatically clearing my throat. Hashtag housing segregation in everything. I feel like it's going to come up a bit in this episode. Right. Just a hunch. Well, it is in everything. And segregated neighborhoods means segregated schools. And when you're growing up, that's where you make most of your friends. That's where you're spending so much of your time. For more on that, I spoke with another expert on cross-race friendships. Her name is Chinzia Pica-Smith. She's an associate professor at Assumption College, and she teaches prospective educators and therapists, many of whom are white

and will end up working with kids of color in the public school system. Children will find each other across racial lines when they enjoy equal status, when they collaborate with one another on common goals, and when they are supported by authority. And that is not happening in schools today. First of all, schools are segregated across the nation. So they're absolutely set up inequitably. Secondly, even in schools that are demographically racially diverse for those rare occasions when they are, tracking happens in those schools so that students of color are overrepresented in lower academic tracks. And then in those schools, students of color are more likely to be taught by less experienced, white, middle class, monolingual teachers. And those teachers often lack professional development on implicit racial bias. So basically she's saying even on the rare occasions on which students are going to

putatively integrated schools, they're still being divvied up by race because of tracking. And you've also got kids of color, Black and Latinx and Native, being punished far more harshly for the same infractions we've reported on this before. Not to mention just curricula that leaves them out entirely, that doesn't mention them at all. Yeah, and Chinzia told me, no wonder these students are marginalized and having a hard time making cross-race friendships, let alone any friendships. When we have created a system of education that is racially equitable across the board, we're going to see children enjoying cross-race friendships at a much higher rate.

Gene, taking it back to the Bay for a second. I have that coup song in my head, Strange Arithmetic. Do you know that one? I don't. I don't. Oh, it's so good. I feel like the answer to everything we talk about on Coastwitch is flip the system. Bring it all down. Yes. But barring that, Gene, you and I have some of the things that can lead to cross-racial friendships.

Like what? I went to diverse schools. I'm the product of a cross-ethnic marriage. True. So I've been putting in these reps since, I don't know, infancy. You've been in the game forever. I don't got none of that. I grew up in, infancy. They've been in the game forever. I don't got none of that.

I grew up in a black neighborhood, went to black middle school, black elementary school, mostly black high school. Yeah, I mean. Well, we work together too. Oh, that probably helps. Here's Beverly Daniel Tatum again.

So when we talk about friendships that develop through work, those are also about proximity, right? You are seeing people every day. You're engaged in common tasks. But then the question is, do they cross boundaries outside of work? All right. So we've established that you and I have a relationship that extends outside of work. But, you know, there's a lot of people who like to claim, you know, that somebody with they have a colleague let's say who uh for the purposes of saying that they have a diverse friend group they promote their brown

work colleague it's a full-time capital f friend you know who you are yes they'd be doing like race inflation you know what i mean right and you know that one poc friend is just the person that you have a 15 minute conversation with at the coffee maker. That's a slow coffee machine. Or I don't know, what is the water cooler? Whatever that thing is these days. Anyway, when Beverly is talking about crossing boundaries outside of work, she's actually talking about spending quality time together, maybe talking about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with work.

And that's where she says things can get challenging. And to help illustrate that point, we're going to hear now from a woman named Krasana. She wrote to us about some tension that arose in one of her friendships that crossed that work boundary. I think it really started after I had my bachelorette and I didn't invite her. So, Chrisana met her friend Sarah, who she's talking about right there, when they were both at orientation

for their new jobs as public defenders. Chrisana's Black, Sarah became her first real white friend. Chrisana actually calls Sarah one of her best friends, but she rarely invites her to do things with her close Black friends. Like she made a joke and she said that I segregate my friends. And I was like, hmm, you may have a point. And I've been thinking about it for a long time, for months now. Krasana didn't grow up around white people and never thought she would have a close friendship with someone white. I think it was like a defense mechanism that like, white people didn't want to be friends with me.

And so for me, I was like, well, I don't want to be friends with them either. And this attitude is very common and makes total sense, says Chinzia Pika-Smith. When educators, especially white educators, see that children of color are coming together in same-race friendships. White educators will panic and say, well, they're self-segregating and they're expressing prejudice. They don't want to be with the white children. What we find is that in spaces where there is racial inequity, that is a protective response. It is not about out-group prejudice. It's about preservation.

In white children, exclusive in-group same-race friendships is correlated with out-group prejudice. Whoa. Okay. So she's saying that black kids are huddling together at the school cafeteria table in order to – for solidarity because they're ostracized otherwise in mostly white schools, right? Yep. But those whites-only tables, which are most of the rest of the tables, that is white kids policing, like, their space for whiteness. Yeah.

But the black kids are the ones who are called self-segregating, which I find very interesting. Oh, yeah, because whiteness is normal. Right, exactly. Right, right. Oh, man. And, you know, and Chrisana said it herself. She had Black friends for most of her life to protect herself from being rejected. But somehow she managed to make friends with Sarah.

They managed to beat the odds. They got close as adults. Very, very close. They were real friends. They hung out outside of work. But Sarah felt like there was still a boundary up between them. Why did Chrisana hang out with her separately from her other close friends who are Black? hung out outside of work. But Sarah felt like there was still a boundary up between them. Why did Chrisana hang out with her separately from her other close friends who are Black?

I think I became a little defensive. I said, well, I haven't met any of your white friends either. And so, and I was like, we should talk about this. And it's moments like this, Jean, where friends will start growing apart. Because so often, that discussion never happens. Here's Beverly Daniel Tatum again. There are situations that can cause tension in a relationship, and you have to be willing to be able to talk about it. There's a study that was done probably 20 years ago, maybe more, at UC Berkeley by a sociologist named Troy Duster, who was interested in black-white

friendships in college. And what he found was that both groups of students were interested in developing cross-racial friendships, but they wanted to do it in different ways. The white students wanted to kind of just hang out together. Let's, you know, go have pizza, have a beer. The black students were more interested in engaging with white peers in a more structured environment. They wanted to have dialogue about race and social justice issues. Meanwhile, the white students didn't really want to talk about race. they just wanted to hang out. Because of the racial context in which we're all living, if we want to have cross-racial relationships, part of what makes them successful is our willingness

and ability to learn how to talk about racism, even in the context of the friendship. So did Chrisana and Sarah ever talk about any of this? Well, you will find out very soon. A teaser. Because this episode is a collaboration with WNYC's Death, Sex and Money podcast hosted by Anna Sale. And she spoke at length with Chrisana and Sarah. Here's Anna.

And we have tons more stories from people about when race became a flashpoint in her friendship. And it's interesting to hear these moments that have stuck with people for years and how rarely friends have actually talked directly about them afterwards. We're going to drop that death, sex, and money episode in our feed tomorrow. Until then, we're going to hear from a couple more listeners who wanted to better understand how race was affecting their friendships. Stay with us. We'll see you next time. bottles. Rothy's are fully machine washable. Best of all, they're comfortable and have zero break-in period thanks to their seamlessly knit design. Plus, Rothy's always come with free shipping, free returns, and free exchanges. You'll quickly discover why BuzzFeed called them their forever shoes. Rothy's are available in a wide array of colors and patterns.

Find your perfect pair at rothys.com slash switch. Support also comes from Discover. Did you know that Discover matches all the cash back you earn at the end of your first year? Plus, it's automatic and there's no limit to how much you can earn or how much they'll match. Millions of people a year are getting their cash back matched like rain falling from the sky. Cashback Match, only from Discover. Learn more at discover.com slash match. What does it take to start something from nothing? And what does it take to actually build it? I'm Guy Raz. Every week on How I Built This, I speak with founders behind some of the most inspiring companies in the world. How I Built This from NPR. Listen and share with your friends. Jean.

Shireen. Code Switch. Okay, so we're talking about friendship on this episode. And Shireen, you started off this whole episode with data from the Yale sociologist Grace Kao. That's right. She's the quantitative researcher who found that Asian Americans are more likely than Black and white Americans to have friends outside their race. Asian Americans are more likely than Black and white Americans to have friends outside their race. They're also more likely to go to predominantly white schools and live in predominantly white neighborhoods. So if they're going to have friends, they kind of have to be interracial. What a coincidence. That is the exact situation

that our next letter writer, Amy, found herself in. I mean, I think I'm at a place right now where I think I'm a lot more comfortable in a room full of white people than in a room full of Asian people. And like, what does that make me? Okay, so Amy is a junior at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She's the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she was raised in a really, really white suburb. And that meant that I grew up, unfortunately, with very few friends of color. the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and she was raised in a really, really white suburb. And that meant that I grew up, unfortunately, with very few friends of color, probably due to internalized racism, but also because there were very few people of color in my town and my school district in general.

Can we talk a little bit more about probably due to internalized racism? Ooh, listen, listen, listen. So Amy told us that when she was really young, she rejected her mom's Chinese cooking. Like she actively avoided eating it. She was like, yo, I don't want to eat this. So her mom made Chinese food for everybody else. And I'm doing air quotes, American food for Amy.

Wow, that was really nice of her mom. My mom would never. I know, you're going to eat what I'm cooking. Or you're going to starve. And the high school stuff was really interesting, too, because Amy told us that she thought her high school was overwhelmingly white. But with some distance, a couple years out, she realized that it might not have been as white as she remembered. So her younger sister went to the same high school and managed to make a bunch of friends of color so amy just kind of actively avoided and blotted out the people of color who were around her the few asian friends i did have at the time were really hard friendships due to a lot of reasons that did not

have to be phrased amy also told us that she did not fit in with the other asian girls in her high school because she was in her, loud and bad at math. Not the words I would use. Yeah, yeah. But as we were talking about before, white friend circles are policed to maintain their whiteness. And so Amy's friend circles, which are mostly white, have been full of people, she said, who tormented her. They would make fun of my parents' accents. They would call me Ling Ling.

I remember my senior year of high school, I was officially labeled the token Asian friend by my friend group. And looking back, most of the bullying came from girls who were my friends, who were a part of my friend group, and who I remained friends with until we graduated high school. That makes me mad. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. I mean, it should. So now Amy's in college.

She's wrestling with all these big questions about her identity, which is what folks do in college. But her social universe, it looks kind of the same. She kept pointing out that her friends are her ride or dies, but they are just not making any space for her in conversations about race. I have white friends who patronize me and talk over me when it comes to discussing politics, particularly when it comes to discussing race and politics. And then being the one in charge of calling out microaggressions is also exhausting. And they were just like, is nothing OK? Like, why is like everything

a problem for you and it's just i mean their friendship is important awesome but it's hard when like this thing that means a lot to me feels like a burden to them is the college that she goes to super white so it is a pwi a white institution. It's also way more diverse than the suburbs she grew up in, in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis area. It's diverse, but she hasn't really availed herself of those communities. But she's trying what she wants to try. In fact, she talked to some other students of color about how she was feeling about all of this stuff. Another Asian girl who grew up in a suburban Minnesota suburb like me suggested that I stop talking to all my white friends

because that's what they did in high school. And I was super confused and surprised and shocked by this suggestion because it's just never really occurred to me before. But my dilemma is, is there a healthy middle ground? Am I a sellout to my race? Can I keep on being friends with white people and still retain my identity? And am I allowed to be friends with people who are also sometimes oppressors? Right.

And also, I just want to say to Amy, like, she should know that she came out of these white suburbs, which are not accidentally white suburbs, right? They're segregated white suburbs for a reason. She came out of that place with the exact universe of ideas and skepticisms about brown people and people of color that those places are meant to reproduce. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just because she's brown doesn't mean she would not have internalized any of that any less than all the white people who do that all the time. Luckily, we found an expert who thinks about stories just like this a lot. Amy's is a very typical story.

Whose voice is that? Oh, yeah. My name is David Ng. David Ng is an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania in mighty, mighty Philadelphia. And I'm also a professor in Asian American studies, comparative literature, and women's studies. And you are the author of? I am the author of a new book, Gene. Co-authored with my dear friend, Shinhee Han, who is a New York-based psychotherapist.

It's called Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation on the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Damn, David Ng is doing all the things. He has all the woke jobs. All the woke jobs. You know what I mean? He should be teaching Jamaican American Studies, too. Melancholia, Racial Dissociation is a collection of case histories and commentaries about Asian American college students that David and Shinhee have encountered in their work. Because Asian American college students, they say, have a particular set of anxieties and concerns.

Not dissimilar to the dilemma that Amy brings up here in her letter to Code Switch. And so in their work, David and Shin-Hee are addressing those anxieties sociologically and psychologically. I do the structural critique. She tends to the symptoms. All right, so racial melancholia and racial dissociation. Let's get into those two things.

Yeah, it's a little wonky sounding. We're going to explain a story comma here. For me too, because I'm like, what? David said that way back in 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote this essay in reaction to World War I. It was called Mourning and Melancholia. Freud said that there's this thing called mourning.

Mourning, which is normal. You lose something, lose a boyfriend, lose a girlfriend, lose a parent. You mourn it, you get over it, you move on. But there's this other thing called melancholia. Melancholia for him is never-ending. It's, for him, pathological, and it's a mourning without end. And so, two decades ago, David and Shin-Hee coined this idea they called racial melancholia.

It's about this ongoing mourning as it comes to identity. Processes like immigration and assimilation, which are never complete, they put immigrants and Asian Americans along a continuum where they can never quite mourn or get over the losses of homeland, of language, of culture. So this is what I've been suffering with my entire life. There's a word for it. There's two words for it. Racial melancholia. I want to say it with a Spanish accent. I was going to say, you put some Shireen on it.

What about racial dissociation? Okay, so dissociation is when people are having experiences that don't line up with the way they're explaining those experiences to themselves. So if you're having an experience that is racialized, but you don't have the vocabulary to talk about that experience being about race or racism, or you don't believe that that experience is about race or racism, you get caught up in this weird bond. David calls this the conundrum of colorblindness. And you already see this with Amy. In her first paragraph of the letter she sent you, she says that she has internalized racism. And that's part of the reason why she didn't really have many friends in high school who were Asian American. And then she

says they were very difficult friendships, but they weren't due to race. So it's a strange contradiction. Amy didn't tell us what made the few friendships she had with other Asian American kids so tough. But also she said that her white friends were her tormentors. Right. So clearly she can handle difficult relationships. Exactly. When she says my friends were also my bullies, that part really kind of broke my heart because if you really consider someone a good friend they should not be your bullies and the bond she's in is that she's isolated herself from all the brown people who might be able to validate the way she feels about all the stuff when she talks to her white friends they have no idea what she's talking about. And they talk over her.

And when she talks about race and her experiences, they disbelieve it. And then when she talks to her friends of color, they seem too radical for her. And again, that is the contradiction. And just to zoom out a little bit more, David said that to understand what Amy is going through specifically, we have you don't shake the table or point out the problems with that arrangement. And that's true in the macro sense, in the larger societal sense. But you can see up close how it plays out for somebody like Amy. This idea of Amy being able to align with her white friends, to be an honorary white, to be a model minority, to be adjunct to whiteness, that is a long, long history. And real quick, David pointed out that the doctrine of colorblindness, that race doesn't matter, that we shouldn't talk about it, blah, blah, blah, that really set in in the 1990s, about a generation or so out from the civil rights movement, right? And it meant that a lot of younger people who grew up after that time just do not have the vocabulary to talk about inequity and injustice. And so the students who David and his co-author Shinhee say they're talking to and meeting with, they're struggling with sometimes debilitating anxiety, specifically because

they've essentially been denied the language to articulate these things that are happening to them and shaping their lives. Because colorblindness makes them dissociated. Exactly. That's a lot, Gene. Right? Like, melancholy and grief and alienation as a consequence of structural racism. I mean, that's a lot. I feel like the government should all pay for us to have therapy. Listen, I'm with it. Put that on your platforms.

So did David have any advice for Amy? Well, one thing he says she has going for her is that right now she is in college like for a few reasons that's a really big boon to her like for at least a little while longer she's in a place with a critical mass of people of color david pointed out that people who live in homogenous spaces and then go to reasonably diverse colleges don't suddenly have diverse friendships after college, right? So there's a good chance that this is the most and last diverse space she may find herself in. Take advantage, Amy. And, like, that's important because David was like, look, there's no way you can get around being around brown people,

and Asian people specifically, if you want to have brown and Asian friends. And because she's on a college campus, she also has access to counseling, which I wish I would have taken advantage of when I was in school. The big caveat, David said, was that whoever she talks to needs to have some cultural competency. Definitely. Right. any of this history, and if they don't know anything about the history of race in America, as he put it, about the problem of culture, about the problems of language, about Asian American immigration, about the idea of being a model minority, Amy might end up reenacting the same dynamics in the clinic that she's experiencing outside of the clinic. But, David said, she might find the space she needs to work through some of her feelings in the classroom.

So I think that there is a lot of times a false idea that ethnic studies programs, Asian American studies classes, African American studies classes, that these are all me classes. It's about me, me, me and my victimization. It's about me, me, me, and my victimization. It's not. It's actually about trying to understand the longer histories that get us to the racial conflicts that are around us, all around us today. And my job in the classroom is to provide the students with a history, but also a critical vocabulary, not just to understand their own life experiences, but how to contextualize those life experiences into a much longer history. And part of the way in which the clinic and the classroom come together is that in both of those

spaces, these students are trying to re-narrate the story for themselves. And if they can re-narrate it, either in the clinic or in the classroom, that can often be a very healing process. It definitely can. I am a product of those classes. And I can say it was definitely very healing for me. And Amy, our producer Jess wanted to tell you that you don't have to stop kicking it with your white friends because they're white. I mean, Shereen says this too, but you definitely do not need to kick it with people who treat you poorly. Just remember that.

So maybe you need to stop kicking it with them. Perhaps. Yes, perhaps. All right. So far in this episode, we've been talking a lot about the ways that race can be a point of tension in interracial or cross-racial friendships. But of course, that can also be the case when two people share a racial identity. Ooh, child. Let me tell you. Our next letter is about that exactly. And for that, we are bringing in our Code Switch teammate, Leah Dinella. What's good, Leah?

Hi. All right, Leah, what's the situation? Okay, so this letter came from a woman named Sarah in New York. Dear Code Switch, I once had a coworker who quickly became a friend outside of work. She was black, and I'm half black, half white, and we quickly bonded over a passion for racial and gender equality. Sarah says this friendship with her coworker

flourished instantly. Like when a couple starts dating attached at the hip. I spent time with her kids, who called me auntie, and she and I frequently had lunches, coffees, happy hours, and dinners, and I invited her to my wedding. So these two are super close, and one of the things they're both dealing with is this manager at work, who Sarah described as being abusive. He targeted women of color, getting angry when we scheduled doctor's appointments, blaming us for our white male counterparts' mistakes, unwarranted threats of termination and pay reduction. But slowly over

time, he began to leave me alone, whereas he doubled down on treating my coworker horribly. Uh-oh. Yeah. So this all came to a head one day at a company-wide meeting when this manager praised Sarah for a project she had recently done. And my coworker, understandably at her wit's end, sent me a string of texts telling me that his praise meant nothing and I should watch out for him. Then she explained that there were two types of black employees at the company. Ones with integrity like her, who set a good example for her kids, and complicit slaves on the plantation like me. Wow. Damn, she went in. She did, yeah. And Sarah said that she was completely humiliated and also totally thrown off by those messages. Understandably. She didn't know where they were coming from, especially because she says she had

gotten so many threats herself from this manager and had consistently stood up and called him out for his racism and sexism. So she asked her co-worker to talk to see if there had been some sort of misunderstanding. I told her that she'd really hurt my feelings and she said I was wrong to accuse her of doing so and that I was stirring up drama. She declined to come to my wedding, and I never succeeded in convincing her that I wasn't a traitor to the race. I told her I needed to step away from the friendship, and she sent me a text with many exclamation points about how this was all in my head, and then she blocked me on Facebook. Then I blocked her on everything else. I still feel insecure about being a traitorous,

tragic mulatto that have chipped away at my racial imposter syndrome with the help of family and other friends. I hope this story resonates with someone. Sarah. So it feels like, okay, this is a question about race, but also there's other stuff going on here too. Oh yeah, there's a lot of other stuff. I mean, there's definitely race and racism, maybe some colorism, workplace harassment. So I called in someone to help sort through this. Her name is... Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. I am a licensed psychologist in Georgia and the creator of Therapy for black girls. And the platform is really

designed to take mental health topics and make them very relevant and accessible to black women and girls. Joy has a weekly podcast where she talks about mental health issues. She also curates a directory of therapists in the U.S. and Canada who she says do great clinical work with black women and girls. And she said in her clinical practice, the number one thing that people want to talk about is work. But I think outside of that, you know, we likely spend quite a bit of time with our friends. And so, you know, tension and other concerns with our friends comes up quite a bit in therapy. This situation with Sarah and her friend has to do with both friendship and work. Yeah, exactly.

And Joy said that even though this kind of story wound up manifesting as a friendship issue, it really stemmed from being in a toxic workplace. Because it sounds like the boss is just awful. And so there's a lot going on there. And it sounds like what the friend has done is misplaced the anger that she rightfully feels towards this boss and put it on to her former friend. Sarah's friend probably couldn't freak out at her boss. Right. But she probably felt like she had to freak out at someone. Oh, definitely. If she's the kind of person like I am, she can't keep stuff bottled up inside. And I just want to take this moment to apologize to anyone that I have done this to.

I humbly accept your apology. So sorry, Jean. I will not comment on that. I'm sorry, Leah. But Sarah is also in a position where she's likely to take her friend's comments very seriously. And that's, one, because she cares a lot about racial justice.

But it's also partly because, as she said, she was somewhat sensitive already about her racial status. Right. So, you know, she told me she used the phrase racial imposter syndrome for a reason. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that my first gut reaction was to go find some other black people to tell me that I'm a good black person. You know, you said you were humiliated. Like, was there a part of you that was worried, like, she could be right? Or like, she was like, pointing to something that you hadn't like seen about yourself? Oh, sure. I mean, I immediately started like flipping back in my mind, like, like in what way could I be, you know, I guess in her metaphor, like sucking up to the plantation owner.

Here's Joy again. People who identify as biracial often do struggle with this kind of making sense of both of their worlds kind of pieces. And so it sounds like, you know, this is something that was like a sensitive spot for Sarah already. And I think that that is also something, you know, if she's going to work with a therapist would be something to talk with a therapist about, you know, like, is this showing up in other places in her life? One element that could be at play here when it comes to work is also that lighter skinned black women, whether they're biracial or not, do get treated preferentially. That's according to a woman named Jeffreyann Wilder, who studied colorism for more than 20 years.

And she said that lots of black folks actually tend to be mostly friends with people who have similar skin tones. And when they do have friendships that cross those lines, they rarely, if ever, talk about the colorism that they're experiencing. Wow. Yeah. So we don't know, obviously, exactly what was going on in this friend's head. But it's very possible that the friend may have been experiencing worse treatment from her boss and been incredibly frustrated, but felt like there was no good way to express that frustration and no one to talk to. Of course, that doesn't mean it was right for her

to call Sarah a complicit slave on the plantation. Yeah, that was... She just pulled up the shank like, ah. That's so little. And also, just like like because they're friends she probably might have known that that was the thing that would make sarah feel the worst you know oh yeah yeah good point but still it sounds like this friend was in a very stressful situation um and when people are really stressed they don't always act in exactly the ways that they would be

most proud of so leah do these two go anywhere from here? I mean, is there a way to salvage this relationship? Well, okay. So Joy said that in situations like this, there are a couple of steps you can take. And there are also a couple of things to remember. The first thing is you can't save a friendship by yourself. Is there a level of reciprocity in the friendship? So are you kind of giving and taking in the relationship as much as the other person is also giving and taking? When I spoke to Sarah, she said she had reached out to her friend a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways.

But each time the friend just kind of brushed it off and said that Sarah was being dramatic. I just know what that's like, though. Oh, it's dead. Joy also said that when someone wrongs you, they need to apologize for sure. But you also have to be honest with yourself about whether you can actually get over what they did. Even when someone apologizes, we are by no means required to let them back into our lives, even if we accept the apology.

So I think that that's the difficult part for people, too, is that they think, okay, well, I can apologize and try to make this thing better. And then we can kind of pick up where we left off in the friendship, when the truth of it is that the other person is entitled to say, this hurt me too much. And I don't think that I want to resume the relationship. Joy says, lastly, it's crucial to acknowledge that losing a friendship is very, very painful and can be comparable to breaking up with a romantic partner. There isn't often a script for what happens when a friendship breaks up, but it can be the same kind of devastation and maybe sometimes even more devastating to lose somebody who has been a really close friend to you. And so I think sometimes there can be the tendency for other people in our lives to maybe minimize the pain of losing a friend,

but it can really be a very traumatic loss. And you would likely experience a grief reaction to the loss of this kind of a relationship, just like you would anything else. Yeah, I just want to say real quick, like talking through these questions is like reminds you of all the ways that the rules of friendships are like much more implicit than they are for like romantic relationships. Like there might be like you, you probably have some things that are like big, bright lines for whether your partner did something out of bounds or whether your parent did something that was out of bounds. Right. But for friendships, we don't know how to talk about like the things we expect of our friends and the things we need to change to keep our friendships alive. You know what I mean? Yeah, Joy was saying we have no real, like, script for how to fight with our friends, for how to even, like, say you did this minor thing that hurt me. So, like, when something big comes up, we have no idea what to do.

Yeah. In Sarah's case, she wound up talking things over with her friends and family and stepping away from that friendship. And she said she did give herself time to grieve almost a year and a half. And ultimately, she hopes that sharing this story will be helpful to other people. I just think people would feel a lot better if we talked a little bit more openly about friendship breakups and about stuff that's really quite embarrassing like this. Because if you come out of the interaction and you feel righteous, you know, that's an easy story to tell. But we don't really want to come out and say, like, this was humiliating and I'm still really embarrassed about it.

You know, what this makes me think about is it makes me think about what david ing said about melancholia and just like if you don't have that time to grieve if you don't mourn these friendships and you don't know how to mourn them you can be suffering trying to figure out what went wrong for forever, you know? Some of the most, like, long-lasting periods of sadness in my life have been around friendships that just sort of dissipated, you know what I mean? It was weird to talk about them like that, like, until much later that I appreciated that were, like, some of the most important and intense friendships, you know, relationships that I had.

That's real. Good luck, sir. Good luck. Well, thanks, Leah. You gave me definitely a lot to think about. Oh, thank you. Time for some friendship counseling. Honestly, I feel like we stopped getting friendship counseling like after elementary school.

You guys are friends. You're going to sit down here, you're going to apologize. Yeah, that's right. After elementary elementary school people don't do that no more and that's our show but before we go we heard from a bunch of you that you miss hearing the songs that are giving us life so we're getting back back into it. And this week, we had to go with a classic. What about your friends? What about your friends? What about your friends?

What about your friends? Everyone's like, I think I'm a little crazy. I think I'm a little crazy. That, of course, is What About Your Friends by TLC. This is the song giving us life. And you can follow me at Radio Mirage and Gene at GED215. That's G-E-E-D-215. And you can follow the whole Codeswitch team at NPR Codeswitch.

You can follow Leah at AskLiesel. And of course, you can always email us at Codeswitch at NPR.org and subscribe to the newsletter by going to NPR.org slash newsletters. This episode was produced by Jess Kang and Leah Dinella, who you just heard. And shout out to the rest of the Code Switch family. Karen Grigsby-Bates, Kumar Devarajan, Adrian Florido, L.A. Johnson, and Steve Drummond.

Leah also edited this episode. Oh, wow. Doing all the things. Did I not say that? Having all the woke jobs. Our interns are Diane Lugo and Isabella Rosario. I'm Shereen Marisol Maragi. And I'm Gene Demby.

Be easy, y'all. Peace. There's more to watch and read these days than any one person can get to. That's why we make Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Twice a week, we sort through the nonsense, share reactions, and give you the lowdown on what's worth your precious time. Listen and subscribe to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.