The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person

by Frederick Joseph

I say pretend because there is no way that any Black person who is born in this house, which is on fire, and always has been, doesn’t come to realize that smoke is filling their lungs.

put it plainly, we have to learn a lot of white crap, including white history, much of which is not even true. Meanwhile, white people never have to learn about us, because doing so would force white people to be held accountable for the many ways they’ve mistreated—and continue to mistreat—people of color.

Having the ability to survive without having to know or develop a level of respect for groups of people is part of the legacy of American racism and white privilege.

Again, we are definitely all different, and that’s fine, and that’s okay, but those differences are actually quite interconnected, and maybe if they understood that part of it, they wouldn’t always think of learning about race or talking about race as something that was automatically supposed to be divisive. Quite the opposite; it’s actually supposed to bring us all together, despite the crowd constantly bellowing that the real racists are the people who talk about race.

But programs like affirmative action, which were put in place to right historical wrongs, are not handouts. Think back to that YouTube video. Affirmative action isn’t putting all the Black kids’ balls in the basket for them. It’s not even moving all the Black kids to the front row. Affirmative action is letting some Black kids sit in the same row as most of the white kids.

But we have to learn to see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and find new ways to trust other people’s words when they tell us and show us how we’re hurting them. Because doing the right thing sometimes means putting the pain of others before our own, especially if we are part of creating it.

TARELL: Words have power because we endowed them with power. Words, like dollars, don’t actually matter until human beings feel that they do or say that they do or socially agree that they do.

It’s a testament to how powerful Tarell’s story is: even being on the outside looking in, I still learned to love a community more than I did before and in the process became a better person. Which is the same thing I often want for people who aren’t from my communities, people like many of you. Just because it isn’t yours doesn’t mean you can’t still treat it with love and care.

you’ll be the friend to someone else that I’ve been to you. You’ll remind people when they do something wrong that it’s not okay, and you’ll step in to be an accomplice when the moment calls for it. You’ll take a look at yourself and find the courage not to hurt people the way you have in the past, and the way others have done and continue to do.