Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

This chapter unpacks the racial tensions that can subtly yet profoundly impact interracial friendships. Sow and Friedman recount how Sow attended a party in Friedman’s backyard. Ann had offered her backyard as the venue for a friend’s birthday party. Sow was hurt when she noticed that she was the only Black person in attendance.

Sow and Friedman reference writer Wesley Morris, who refers to experiences like this as “the trapdoor of racism,” a concept that describes “the limited level of comfort that Black people can feel around white people who are part of their lives in a meaningful way” (118). The metaphor encapsulates how racism can suddenly disrupt the sense of safety and belonging in interracial friendships.

Morris points out that in many interracial friendships, friends instinctively avoid talking about race, but they eventually experience some incident that forces them to confront it. Sow shares that her experiences of racism differ depending on who she is interacting with. With strangers, “it feels like bracing for impact while her plane crashes,” but with a friend or partner, it feels less dramatic (119). Morris compares these cases to someone dropping mustard on a person’s pants and not noticing it—for the person whose pants are now stained, the incident is uncomfortable, but the other person does not even realize that something has happened.