Being Friends with White People

In response to a recent Reuter's poll which found that 40% of white Americans have only white friends, Dr. Brittney Cooper, Rutgers University professor and co-founder of Crunk Feminist Collective, wrote this excellent essay about "The Politics of Being Friends with White People." She describes how she and her childhood best friend, who was white, drifted apart as they got older:

"By the end of junior high school, as adolescent friendships go, Amanda and I had drifted apart, but in an amicable sort of way. We couldn’t giggle about the same kinds of boys since our tastes fell along racial lines, couldn’t trade makeup or hair products, or move through each other’s social circles with ease any longer, because increasingly these things were defined by race. So I decided that I needed black girls for friends, girls who liked the boys I liked, who went to churches sort of like mine, where we didn’t have “youth group” but youth either joined the choir or the usher board, girls whose cultural experiences were and would be closer to my own. Maintaining integrated friendships past a certain age is more struggle than triumph."

Read the full essay here.