Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman

Author:Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

The Trapdoor

It was one of those perfect California nights, not too cold or too hot. Ann’s backyard was strung with lights and punctuated with the cheerful buzz of conversation as people milled around with glasses of rosé in hand. She had offered up her patio as the venue for a friend’s birthday party. And—even better—Aminatou happened to be in town. She was in Los Angeles for a work trip and had been looking forward to attending the backyard soiree because she knew and liked the birthday girl and many of the other guests.

When she showed up, the party was already in full swing. Aminatou found that the snacks were delicious and the mood lovely. But what should have been a fun night celebrating and catching up with friends turned sour when Aminatou noticed that she was the only Black person milling around Ann’s back patio.

Aminatou was thrown off guard. It felt surreal to be at a gathering like this. She knew Ann didn’t only have white friends, yet here Aminatou was, scanning the yard for the slightest hint of melanin. Nothing. Not even a racially ambiguous tan.

Could this really be possible? After all these years of knowing Ann? Why was Aminatou the only Black person at this party? She was screaming inside: Where are your Black friends?

Surely the other guests could sense her panic. She felt a sinking sensation, like she was falling through the brick tiles of Ann’s patio.

The writer Wesley Morris calls this experience the trapdoor of racism. “For people of color, some aspect of friendship with white people involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at any moment, by a slip of the tongue, or at a campus party, or in a legislative campaign,” he wrote in 2015. “But it’s not always anticipated.” The trapdoor describes the limited level of comfort that Black people can feel around white people who are part of their lives in a meaningful way. Even if these white people decide they will confront racism every day, it’s guaranteed they will sometimes screw up and disappoint the Black people they know.

Race plays out differently in every friendship. And not all interracial relationships involve a Black person and a white person, but ours does. So that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

Contrary to what pop culture would have us believe (looking at you, Green Book), most interracial friendships aren’t actually rooted in deep conversations around racial difference. Not in the beginning, at least. Like all relationships, interracial friendships begin when two people bond over the things they have in common. (Remember our story of sameness?) In a conversation with us, Morris pointed out that in some interracial friendships, there are things both people instinctively know not to speak about. “There’s a comfort that you have in these relationships that is somewhat contingent upon not going there. Everybody has a boundary, a place where the relationship just kind of tacitly knows not to go,” he says. “But there

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.