All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep

I recently finished reading All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep by Andre Henry. I was intrigued and humoured by the title as soon as I saw it. The title especially resonated with me because I have been going through a period of growth in my life where I have had to consider whether the friendships in my life are going to be able to grow with me. As mentioned in my last post, my closest friends are and always have been predominantly with white women, and I just don’t know if they’ll want to be friends with me now that I regularly talk about things like white supremacy, and read books with titles like All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep – and just as importantly, whether I’ll want to be friends with white women who are unable to and uninterested in talking about white supremacy, or feel personally offended if they see me reading a book called All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep.

It has been over 3 years now since I began developing Let’s Talk About Race, 2.5 years since my first workshop and just over a year since I started this blog and began booking more workshops in earnest. It’s been a period of vast transformation for me, in how I see the world and how I interact in the world. In many ways, being awakened to the white supremacist world in which I live is utterly exhausting. I see inequities and injustices where I used to see none; some days, I wish I could still see nothing because life might be a tad easier. However, I don’t buy that excuse completely – I think even before I saw it and could name it, I felt the white supremacy and internalized it anyway – which some may argue is more exhausting as it comes into the psyche as an unnamed and unknown poison.

Along the way of this personal transformation, I have had the joy of meeting new friends – friends of colour, friends that are children of immigrants of colour, friends that are immigrants themselves – friends that I wouldn’t have been able to get as close to in the past, when I was still desperately masquerading a white woman. These are folks who I would have been polite to in the past, but would have distanced myself from because I’d be too afraid that they’d make me look less white to my white friends, too afraid they’d tarnish this persona I’ve worked on for decades. Now, I suddenly feel more comfortable around these new friends than I ever have before; we can laugh (and grieve) about daily microaggressions we receive, we can share our ‘ethnic’ foods knowing it won’t make each other squeamish or at least we won’t be rude about it even if we don’t like it, we can relate about the traumas we carry from our personal experiences or our family’s experiences of immigration to Canada, we can talk about code switching and what it takes for us to “pass” in this white supremacist society.

In Henry’s book, he writes about a period of time when he lugged a 100-lb boulder everywhere he went around the LA area to “visually express how anti-Black racism burdens the Black psyche”. My boulder may be lighter than Henry’s, but I can definitely relate to having this weight that is always attached to me because I’m a woman of Asian descent living in a white supremacist society. I’ve got this boulder whether I’m with white friends or friends of colour, the difference being that my white friends can’t see this boulder, whereas my friends of colour all have their own living-in-a-white-supremacy boulders.

Henry, as expected, talks about white friends he couldn’t keep – but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t keep any white friends. I have no intention of cutting people out of my life based on race – wouldn’t that be ironic? But I do have intentions of sussing out which friends (of any race) that:

• can see and acknowledge the boulder I carry

• will provide space for me to talk/grieve/cry/complain having to lug it around

• help lighten the load if/when they can

• will not to minimize, dismiss or gaslight me when I talk about white supremacy in action

I was saddened to read of Henry’s experiences of finding out many of his closest people were not able to do those things for him. I really admire the courage it took for him to be his truest self in front of those folks, risking rejection/disappointment/gaslighting, risking that they will not accept him for dating to speak about race. It is a risk for people of colour to talk about race with white people. We’ve been entrenched in white supremacy for so long that it is just counter-culture now to bring it up, call it out, or want to fight it. We get told that we’re making a problem out of nothing; that we should just be happy; that we don’t see the whole picture; that talking about it is what makes it a problem; the list goes on and on. My courage has been slowly building and growing over the past 3 years, and I feel ready – or as ready as I’ll ever be – to find out which white friends I can keep.