How to Talk to Your White Friends About Race

What if you’re a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) person who wants to introduce the taboo subject of race into white friendships? I’ve been trying that myself and here’s what I’ve discovered:

1. Know that you are choosing to do the deep emotional labor of identity work for your white friend. Decide early and commit to taking that responsibility on because you can’t easily walk it back once you assume the role of racial midwife.
2. Be ready to lose the friendship. To talk about race is to inevitably to engage in conflict and trigger shame. Once you open the door on race, you can’t really shut it again. It may disappoint you to lose the friendship but don’t think it’s personal. If a white person chooses self-preservation over you, that’s how unsafe they feel in their central nervous system about race. You can’t grow when you’re that scared.
3. If you do talk race, use “I” statements to tell a story. Your story and feelings conveyed with honesty, integrity and powerful vulnerability are learnable moments for them. This helps reduce the trigger factor of white fragility so they won’t shut down. Think of them as having the nervous systems of young children who easily get hurt and need resilience training. Resilience training is exactly what you’re doing for your white friend.
4. Ask probing questions so they reflect on their whiteness. When they can finally see whiteness, they’ll be able to see color. Their role is to see themselves as a color — white instead of “normal” — and to understand the peculiar behaviors of whiteness. Asking questions for self-discovery works much better than mansplaining whiteness to them which may trigger defensiveness and shutdown.
5. Make a pact to embark on an adventure together through racial territory. The landscape is uncharted and dangerous and you don’t know if either of you will survive it. But you can team up on this journey and both learn something. It may actually extend a friendship that’s likely doomed anyway if you’re evolving but your white friend isn’t. If things go well you can read books on color and whiteness, listen to podcasts and watch shows together. So cozy!
6. Try being a whiteness anthropologist who studies, researches and interviews white people. This less personal, more experimental mindset might be less triggering to you emotionally. No guarantees.
7. Expect both of you to get emotional, intense and angry even if you start out playing nice. Race is emotional because it’s our very identity. Everybody is wounded about race whether they know it or not. It’s okay to get into hot water even if uncomfortable. Hot water is part of the adventure.
8. If the friendship hits the skids, just know that life is long. You have years to mend things if you decide your white friend is worth it. Or let the breakup ride. Either way there’s no rush to decide. In this modern day, having BIPOC friends is generally a desirable status symbol anyway. You can populate a new reality with new friends.

Above all it’s important to keep to your boundaries as a person of color and not fall into the white-pleasing patterns or approval-seeking behavior we had in the old America.

We as BIPOC are shedding our ingrained pleaser behaviors. That’s the practice for us in talking openly about race and building our own resilience. No need to rush yourself back into a mildly racist friendship you’ll later regret.

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