Reply to If you're a POC, do you feel like you need mainly POC friends?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP here. This is not to say that my white friends haven’t been supportive because most have been wonderful. It’s just that I have had to explain a lot - and it’s exhausting and scary worrying about my husband and my sons’ safety all the time.[b] One of my white friends thinks that racism isn’t much on an issue in the DMV area. Another asked me about previous experiences and I confided in her - only to be told that they could happen to anyone of any race. [/b]I don’t have the energy to “prove” these things. Whereas my friends who are POC already know. [/quote]

My closest friends from college are black with a few exceptions.  As a pp mentioned it was great to have support from other people navigating a PWI institution.   My best friends had similar high school experiences that I had going to schools as one of the few black students in certain classes etc. and that “too black” for one environment and “too white” for another.

Now with kids in an area that isn’t very diverse, most of my mom friends are not POC and I would also say not everyone I hang out with would I call a good friend. I have lots of acquaintances. It takes time to consider someone a good friend.  I’d like to think that the people I consider good friends wouldn’t tell me that my life experiences weren’t true, which takes a certain type of arrogance. Or at least that I would feel comfortable enough to be honest about how that made me feel if they did. How does someone think it’s okay to say they know exactly what it is like to live in someone else’s story and then minimize your feelings instead of just listening?  Now I will admit, when all the blackface incidents were coming to light, I had to add, do I think they dressed up in black face and thinks this okay as well as minimizing someone else’s story and acting like they were a black person in a past life to my evaluation of friendship.  The one other thing I would add though, is sometimes being in a public place as the only visible minority, do you think your friends would stand up for you if a racist incident went down.  I like to think the people that are my good friends would.   The courage to stand up for someone else different than you is not something you find easily.  I would add if I had a good friend that I felt had that courage and had the willingness to really listen, it would be worth being vulnerable and letting my guard down to talk about my experiences. [/quote]

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