This piece by Dakota Kim originally appeared on The Establishment, an independent multimedia site founded and run by women.
After 20 years of friendship, I’m finally starting to talk about intersectional racism with my white best friend.
Not racism in a metaphorical way. Not racism like: “Hey, did you happen to leaf through that Ta-Nehisi Coates book I left on the coffee table?” Not racism like: “Wasn’t that Margaret Cho joke so dead-on?” Racism like: “I need you to acknowledge our lives aren’t the same.”
For a long time, I pretended our lives were the same. Sarah (name changed) and I went to the same politically radical college, where we first bonded over our love for practical joke-oriented performance art, cooperative living, and television. She goes to racial justice meetings and founded an arts residency for social justice. Now, Sarah works at an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse hospital. But (and this is a duh) none of this means she will ever completely understand lived-through racism, and its impact on me.
In college, where we bounded across campus discussing Marxism with pine-scented oxygen in our lungs, noshing bagels on the sunny quad, and baking bread in our cooperative house together, it was easy to pretend that Sarah and I were equals in the eyes of society — even though an unconscious part of me always knew that we weren’t.
For starters, there were the basic economics. Sarah’s parents procured internships for her at prestigious museums, took her skiing in the Alps, and spoiled me like I was their second daughter. My parents, meanwhile, hadn’t been to a museum in years, and their idea of leisure as immigrant restaurant owners was sleeping more than six hours a night.
It was easy to pretend that Sarah and I were equals in the eyes of society — even though an unconscious part of me always knew that we weren’t.
But there were also racial inequalities between Sarah and me. When I moved to a small white rural town in the Catskills to live with Sarah, I discovered how hard it was for a politically radical person of color to fit in. While some of my new acquaintances were friendly, others were outright hostile when I talked about cultural appropriation. I was told wearing a sombrero at our Halloween party was not cultural appropriation because cultural appropriation is a relic of the past in our post-racial millennial society. When I asked why there were no local anti-Trump protests, I was told that our town was indeed doing activism, but in a grassroots way (read: nothing that changed the status quo). I soon considered moving away as soon as possible, but didn’t have enough cash yet.
Shortly before my departure, the kraken was unleashed: When I posted “I don’t like the way Kimmy Schmidt portrays Asian-Americans,” a white friend of Sarah, Lucy (not her real name), sent me a long, angry, macroaggressing email. Lucy informed me that I was not Asian, because race did not exist. “Like it or not, we are all Americans,” Lucy lectured. (I checked my skin: yup, still Asian-American.) Lucy told me she was “tired of everything being about race” and the “intolerance of the PC Police.” (I’m guessing that’s me.) Since the election, Lucy said, “now is not the time for more divisiveness.” (I didn’t draw these lines.) Erasing my lived experience, Lucy declared, “Now is not the time to look for problems, when they might not be there.” (Good to know racism is the Boogeyman.)
Furthermore, Lucy understood marginalization, she claimed (not sure she gets what marginalization is). “If you are sensitive to your identity as a person of color, or think that you have been treated as ‘the other,’ consider what it feels like to be singled out as a white person,” she wrote, emphasizing how hard it was to have been accused of racism by her more privileged white friends in the past. She went on to equate my marginalization with being ostracized by her conservative family when she became a “lefty hippie punk liberal.” Lucy wrote that she “felt this deep oppression and lack of acceptance from my family. So I do know what it feels like to be marginalized. Being white doesn’t bring about automatic privilege. We all have our own difficulties, problems and stumbling blocks in life.”
My entire body shook with rage and sadness at the “#notallmen”-style ignorance of the email from a supposed feminist. I knew that she had told multiple friends that white privilege was not real, despite well-researched scientific evidence to the contrary. I couldn’t work or write for a week, disillusioned by the reality of pervasive ignorance in my country. Friends’ replies made it worse — some of my white friends told me they thought Lucy had a valid point in showing she understood racism because of the anti-Semitism her family had suffered.
I wrote Lucy a simple, short email asking her to read about white privilege online, and to get Cornel West’s book Race Matters, because without some fundamental agreements, we weren’t even going to be able to start discussing issues this deep — it would simply be a “yes” versus “no” fight. (She ended up responding, but in lieu of addressing my points, just said I’d always avoided her at parties.)
A couple months later, I finally escaped back to Brooklyn with a sigh of relief, surrounding myself with Asian-American friends and thinking hard about race. But during a one-night visit back to Sarah’s house in the Catskills, I discovered Lucy was coming to dinner. I didn’t want to sit through a dinner party, much less a five-minute chat, with her, and I tried to explain to Sarah that I didn’t want my one night with her to be five hours with Lucy. Sarah said the power wasn’t hers, because her boyfriend had invited Lucy as his guest, and to just try to get along with Lucy because she was her friend too. Sarah had heard about the message Lucy had sent before, but she had not seen it, and she hadn’t asked questions to dig deeper into how it had hurt me. Now, I went into shock at her blasé response.
I spoke not more than three words to Sarah or Lucy during all of dinner — and anyone can tell you I’m usually the chatterbox of the table. Sarah didn’t even seem to notice my intense sadness, which made me even sadder.
Despite our closeness, I realized that Sarah and I lived in two different worlds and probably always would. It was no longer something I could ignore, struggle as I might to keep those rose-colored glasses on by their dangling frame. I fell into a deep depression. A week later, not knowing what else I could do, I opened up my laptop because I was too afraid to call Sarah (and as a writer, I express myself best in words). So nervous that I would alienate my beloved best friend of two decades that my eyes filled with tears at just the thought of no Sarah in my life, I wrote her a letter that changed our friendship forever.
Despite our closeness, I realized that Sarah and I lived in two different worlds and probably always would.
How do you talk to your white best friend about race?
Imperfectly, stumblingly, emotionally, but with honesty and the hope that you can reach one another across the gigantic divides of systemic American racism. “I want to have a real and true friendship with you, not one where we don’t discuss race,” I wrote. “I live in a world that is different from yours, and I need you to understand that. I have been called racist names on the street and in schools my whole life; I need you to acknowledge that as my best friend. I have gotten emails like this my whole life. It is a lot. I am tired and exhausted. I would like you to support me if you can.”
With truth, revealing all the things you hid from her so she wouldn’t see the ugliness in your life, the shame at what you’ve endured even though it’s not your fault. I tell her about age 11: the girl who made slanted eyes at me between each song in band class, forcing me to grit my teeth and try to focus on the sheet music even as tears blurred my vision. Age 12: the white female bully who slapped me across the face in middle school and called me a “chink,” but who I was too afraid to report to the principal. Age 13: my father came home from the ER with broken ribs because he got into a fight with a man who called him a racist name at the chemical plant. 15: the drama director doesn’t ever cast me in a speaking or named role because I’m not what you’d picture in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, even though I’m more talented than the other contenders. I sit quietly in the back of all crowd shots. 16: the sullen boy who tells me the only reason any guy would date me is to use me for sex “like a hooker” and then dump me to marry a white girl. 17: my white Jewish partner’s mother tells him she doesn’t want “yellow” grandchildren. 18: my teacher tells me math should be easy for me because I’m Asian, so I don’t ask for help (even when I’m desperately drowning), and I end up getting a C-. 20: the Korean guy I’m dating asks me to introduce him to a blonde American girl he can date when I finish my study-abroad program and leave Korea. 21: the man on the street who tells me he wants to make me his Hiroshima bride and eat my “slanted pussy” — not because he thinks his tactics will work, but because he wants to show me who has the power. Welcome to New York! 35: the white liberal New Yorker friends who are shocked and disbelieving when I tell them I have to shield myself from doubly racist and sexist comments on the street every week — yes, in cosmopolitan New York; yes, in 2017 — because it is not their experience and they simply can’t imagine New York is that racist. The fact that I even feel like I need to provide specific evidence of racism to them galls me.
It is so cathartic even to write these words to Sarah. I suddenly feel like the tea party in Mary Poppins — am I floating to the ceiling, and will Sarah join me there?
She responds empathetically, stating that “if (Lucy) says anything to me or in front of me that I perceive as willfully uninformed or racist, I will be calling her on it. If it is a fight where she isn’t willing to listen to my side of the argument, she and I will have the same problems that you and her have had, which would lead me to reconsider our (hers and my) friendship. I love you and I NEVER want to behave in a racist manner towards you or anyone.” She asks me to keep sending her links to articles about white privilege and lived racism.
The next time Sarah and I talk on the phone, I feel not only relieved, but that much closer, like our best friendship found a reserve well beneath its surface that we both didn’t know existed, and we’re now both drinking as much water as we can. It’s not perfect, but it’s a beginning. I believe Sarah truly cares about me and will stand up not only for me as a person, but for other people of color who do not have the agency and privilege that I carry as an educated, light-skinned non-black person of color.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a beginning.
It may be frightening to talk to your white best friend about the racism you face, but the alternative is a splintered existence and a constantly code-switching friendship. For a long time, I euphemized my speech about racism as carefully theoretical and philosophical to protect against the white fragility of my friends. I operated under the premise that Trump supporters, not the people sharing my table, were the only racist ones.
Readers of color, it’s better to have extremely difficult talks in a real friendship than to ignore the issues and pretend they don’t exist — all the while feeling alone, unhappy, and confused privately. You are actually doing your interracial friendship — and, IMO, the world — a disservice by shielding it from reality. Your dialogues may or may not synthesize into a lasting friendship, but somehow, a change has got to come, and one potentially fertile ground is in our interracial friendships.
We live in different nations, experiencing different treatment and speaking different languages. But now I know Sarah is listening to my language.
You can support The Establishment’s independent media work by purchasing a ‘Ask Me About My Identity Politics’ T-Shirt or making a donation here.