Navigating diverse friendships can be hard, but this incredible group of white women have found a way: when it comes to acknowledging the complex identity of their mixed friend, Marissa, they acknowledge her black half, but only when it specifically makes them look good!
Wow! We’re simply amazed that anyone would disregard half of their friend’s identity whenever it’s convenient!
“Marissa is really just like us, and we don’t wanna make her feel excluded by focusing on her blackness or how she’s different from us,” said Jill Redding. “So, unless we need her to drive when we’re going through a sketchy neighborhood, we just see her like she’s one of us. Like, we invite her to my dad’s country club gala and everything!”
“We love Marissa no matter what,” added friend Lisa Kerrington. “So we just change the subject if she ever brings up something to do with her being black. Except sometimes when we eat at this vegan soul food restaurant we love. We really need her perspective to explain some of the food to us. In that case, she’s black to us, too.”
Marissa isn’t thrilled at her white friends’ insistence of erasing her black half from their perception until they need it.
“I’m as much black as I am white,” said Marissa. “So it’s pretty shitty when they pretend like that part of me doesn’t exist until it’s convenient. My blackness is not a cool, hip accessory that they can selectively use to their benefit.”
“I actually don’t know why I’m still friends with them,” she added.
But Marissa’s friends still believe they know what they’re doing.
“The color of her skin doesn’t define our friendship with her, ” said Myra Posen, another white friend of Marissa’s. “So her being black is definitely helpful in some cases, like when we want to go to Afropunk. But we don’t want to make her feel like she’s the ‘black friend’ when we go to like, Coachella.”
“I mean, she kind of is our only black friend though,” added Jill.
