The Challenge of Having White Friends Right Now
By: Jeremy Helligar
Tags: Race, Donald Trump, Friendship, Interracial Relationships, Racism

The Challenge of Having White Friends Right Now

When they don’t care about Black pain, they make it worse

Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

Throughout my adulthood, I’ve been blessed with loyal and generous friends. They’ve been hanging in there with me for years, through ups, downs, and sideways, across multiple countries and continents. They’re among my staunchest supporters; some of them happen to be White.

But these are indeed times that can try Black souls — and our friendships, too. Ever since George Floyd used his last breaths to plead for his life while a White cop strangled him with his knee, I’ve discovered that not all of my relationships with White people are what they seem.

I can now separate most of my White friends and acquaintances into two distinct groups. Some may not feel my pain but try their best to understand it. When our conversations turn to race, they don’t let White fragility get in the way of listening and learning.

Then, there are the rest of them.

My husband, White and Australian, bears the brunt of my frustration over race issues in the United States. Although our living together means he has no choice, it still means everything to me that he gamely sits in front of my soapbox and listens to me rant about racial injustice without trying to manage my feelings or make it a two-way street where both sides are to blame.

He recently told me he’d learned much from me about the struggle of being Black in the U.S., something he rarely had to think about in Australia. His level of empathy and understanding of a racial dynamic that’s completely foreign to him impresses me and makes me love him more. He will never know what it feels like to be me, but he doesn’t minimize the challenges I face.

I don’t expect my White friends and acquaintances to be activists who march and wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts. But I do expect them to use their mouths to do more than recite empty platitudes and remind us that everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

I feel lucky to have him in my life, as well as my White friends who get it or are at least trying to. But then there’s an increasingly frustrating group of people who have always been lovely to me, but simply cannot grasp the concept of Black anger and pain. They’re too concerned with preserving the White privilege many of them won’t even acknowledge they have.

I came across a Facebook post from an old college friend in which she touted Parler. In this now-trending social network, people can freely exchange what she called “Republican ideas” without worrying about being fact-checked. The post hit me like a stinging slap across the face because “Republican ideas” have become indistinguishable from pro-Donald Trump rhetoric, and that is why they have to go to a “safe space” to peddle them. I’d always thought she and several people who responded enthusiastically to her post were on my side.

Clearly, they are not. I grew up in Trump country — Kissimmee, Florida — so my past is peppered with old friends and acquaintances just like her. I wouldn’t necessarily have pegged them as racist; whether they are or not is between them and their conscience. But voting for a White supremacist is a tacit endorsement of White supremacy.

For me, this isn’t about the conservative agenda versus the liberal one. I was able to coexist with my White Republican friends back when party affiliation was about political ideology.

In the age of Trump, however, political party ties began to encompass so much more, including my survival and my standing as a gay Black man in a country that became increasingly inhospitable to my communities.

I’m not angry at people who are still trumpeting Trump because they’re Republicans or conservatives. I’m upset because they’re cheerleading for someone who embraces racists for political gain; someone who, as turncoat Kanye West once said about President George W. Bush, doesn’t care about Black people. He doesn’t — no matter how many of us he’s trotted out as political currency.

I’ve heard many White (and, sadly, Black) people defend Trump by denying he’s racist, even though all the evidence screams the opposite. They say he’s denounced White supremacy (although not when it would have counted most — during the first presidential debate with Joe Biden), yet he reinforces it through words and deeds. That doesn’t matter to Trump’s supporters, though. It’s someone else’s problem.

Trump’s entire career has been an exercise in White supremacy. He was sued in the 1970s for refusing potential Black tenants at his housing developments in New York. He called for the execution of five Black and Brown teenagers who had clearly been coerced into confessing to raping a White woman in Central Park in 1989.

More recently, he’s actively campaigned against Black and Brown immigrants from “shithole countries” and supported Confederate statues (and the “very fine people” who defend them), despite their being monuments to men who fought against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery.

The KKK and alt-right groups like the Proud Boys wouldn’t love and support Trump with such ferocity if they didn’t see themselves in him, and if he didn’t embolden them by openly courting them and retweeting their “White Power” racism.

Does the fact that he used racism as a political tool — by defending Kyle Rittenhouse and inviting the couple who held guns on Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis to appear at the Republican National Convention — not say it all?

The latter was a symbolic gesture that spoke volumes about the man who made it. He appealed to his hardcore base, the ones who tout Parler as a safe space for poor underdog Republicans, declare “All Lives Matter,” and shoot to kill Black Lives Matter protesters because they are terrified of a world in which White people don’t control the narrative.

For those who insist on citing Biden’s racial gaffes (“focusing on the gnat and swallowing the camel,” as my sister says), they’re the sort of racial gaffes all White people make, whether they realize it or not. They’re inconsequential in comparison. They don’t threaten my well-being and make me feel unsafe in my own skin.

I don’t expect my White friends and acquaintances to be activists who march and wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts. But I do expect them to use their mouths to do more than recite empty platitudes and remind us that everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I want them to be outraged. I need them to understand why we’re angry and fighting so hard. They need to understand that it is not okay to support a leader who empowers racists and that they must demand change because they care about us as much as they care about tax breaks and unborn children.

It’s bad enough if you watch a bully pummel someone, and you don’t do anything to stop it. Breaking bread with the bully makes you complicit in their awfulness. You can’t call yourself my friend when you’re sitting at the wrong table.