Devin Friedman, who writes for GQ, posted an ad on Craigslist to get black friends because he thought it was quite pathetic that all of his friends were white:
My Craigslist post said, among other things, "I'm a 36-year-old white guy. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and have always gone to diverse schools. I've always had a decent number of black friends. That's changed over time. I work in the publishing industry, which is super white, and I've realized that my group of friends is getting whiter and whiter.... It's amazing to me that almost everyone I know has either black friends or white friends, but not both. We could have a black president, and still not have a very mixed country." Then I added a few more lines about don't let me show up at the bar and you've got a horse tranquilizer for my drink. I guess you could say the post ran a little long. I guess you could say I was worried about the possibility of a misunderstanding.Why one would take out an ad on the Internet looking for a black friend is a legitimate question. Here's my answer:
I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I've always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it'll change; it's probably my wife's fault. But it's time to acknowledge that I've become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. . .
(he's got a sobering paragraph describing how married guys often trade their friends for the husbands of their wife's friend).
Maybe it wasn't about what color Mike was. Maybe the reason I hadn't made any black friends lately was partly because it's hard for men to make new friends, period, as life proceeds and one is no longer 23 years old and no longer has roommates named Jay and Sean and Josh. All new friends come prepackaged. All new friends are couple friends. MattAndChloe, Seth-AndSusan, ElizabethAndMichael. I can't say exactly why. I have a theory that men get more bearlike as they age, increasingly taciturn, hairy, prone to long spells of slumber, prone to growly solitary rummaging.The man can get unsocialized as he ages. And the married man can come to believe there's a division of labor: The woman forms the social connections, and the man is treated in social situations as if he were just learning to feed himself solid food again after a terrible accident. That's why the older the man gets, the more isolated he becomes, the more rarefied his world is, the more other humans seem to be accelerating away from him, the more his friendships become dominated by figures so long known that they're more like comfortable marriages than friendships.
Blackness and whiteness still matter. One of the most modern racial problems we suffer from can be boiled down to this: There is an actual debate going on about whether Barack Obama is the first postracial candidate, if we are living in a postracial world. If we were living in a postracial world, white Americans would not have been so perplexed and terrified by the videotape of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. . .
Fun article.
Just wonderin why everything is BLACK or WHITE? Why not just FRIENDS? ?
Why are people so screwed up L@@KIN for something WHITE or BLACK.
You can't judge a book by it's cover...comes to mind! And what is that old/new saying: If GOD turned us inside out... we'd all be the SAME COLOR...
Wake up and see each of us as HUMAN,,, as PEOPLE... stop putting us all in little boxes...
Why Mexican or Italian? Why not just food? Because each dish has a unique flavor to offer. And clearly God has NOT turned us inside out though He could have made us all the same from the beginning. He didn't. That tells me diversity is something to be appreciated, embraced, celebrated, and yes -even sought out to enrich who we are as people.
Within the Christian community, the book of Ephesians says that the angels stand in awe when we represent racial reconciliation in the body of Christ. Not the dismissal of or assimilation of all races but unity in the midst of diversity. It is a testimony of the gospel at work within us.
So, do african americans ever have this kind of angst? I've met a lot of white guys who have this angst over the "color deficit" in their lives, but I have never heard any person of any other ethnicity or race say that they wish they had more white friends. Why is that?
Funny picture.
That is a good read. I enjoyed the bit about the wife establishing social connections, and the man becoming buddies by default with his wife's friend's husband. I have been having this problem for years.
My wife is not the type to establish social connections, but I am. A lot of times my friend has no idea if he can say yes to getting together and sometimes is stunned that he has to figure it out on his own. Sometimes I end up talking to my buddies' wives to just arrange a get together.
Needless to say a lot of times the friendship gets weakened because my buddy has been so used to going along with the social agenda set by the wife. It's hard losing friends because their wife sets the social calendar.
"Anonymous" WOW!!! I'm turning your comment into a separate blog post. I don't think many guys would be that honest. Thanks, bro!
Ha!!!! I didn't check back until today after making my comment. I have to be anonymous because I think some of my friends or their wives read this blog.
My situation now is that I'm only able to hang out with guys who are allowed to do stuff without their spouse. It's funny and sad.
"allowed"???? Holy crap that's awful. Someone here tell my hubby how good he has it ;)
"anonymous" BRO!! You have no idea how many hundreds of guys did the head nod when you wrote what you wrote. Seriously, I've received some good feedback about the subject. This is a bigger issue than I thought.
Seriously, bro, I'd love to do a separate post about this anonymously to protect you and to give the opportunity to be brutally honest.
If you want to add more to what you said feel free and I'll splice it together. Or if you (or anyone else, for that matter) wants to write 200-300 words describing how much is sucks to be confined to wife's friends, just e-mail it to me: abradley@acton.org