It spurred me to write and express my own sentiments about these turmoils concerning friends and their perspectives on such matters as race relations. I feel I have personally felt my own challenges with this. I think I am in expectation of random people's opinions, but I have struggled with my own friends. I have had to have the discussion with myself, a check in of sorts about the real situation of my friendships. I never expect my friends to think like me. I love them because I value being challenged to grow and being surrounded by strong opinionated cultured intellectual friendships. Yet, there are some topics in which I find myself feeling divided. I find myself feeling like there is an illusion. There is a certain illusion in which some friendships lie in the safety of a "friendship"; it is an allowance to cross boundaries in this illusion. Race relations is one that has stirred some deep feelings of contemplation for me.
While I possess many friends of different races, I fear that the "safety" and even familiarity of these relations has misled or has created a narrow perspective into my experience and life as a black woman. I fear that with the progression of times changing towards racial harmony or acceptance and striving to be as " one"; many forget that there still is an individual struggle. It is an individual struggle that cannot be swept under the rug in generalizations or minimized with idealistic thinking. I feel that people are shrugging their shoulders in impatience with those of us that seem to appear to them not evolved into more worldly beings of "oneness" and spiritual ascension above this world. But we live in this world. This world exists as it is. It is not an illusion. It is real with real life stories in which we must walk real life pages and narrate through. I feel the distance of strangers, but the abandonment of friends. Abandonment through the lack of empathetic understanding in the experiences of those not like them.
I asked myself some probing questions. Have some of the people I call friends crossed boundaries consciously and unconsciously into thinking that because I am a friend of color, they can dismiss my experiences? They say in not so many ways " get over it". Do they think that I will not separate my friendship line from them to guard that which is fundamentally sacred to me as if they were a stranger? I do think that some think that some of us will not go there. But do trust me, some of us will. At the end of the day, let's keep it real. We may stand side by side as friends, but the world will judge and treat us differently in given circumstances. All friendship lines dissolve and every person is to fend for self. I think there is to be a respect and acknowledgment that though we know one another, we don't really "know" one another. We can never walk in one another's shoes. This should never be forgotten.
For those that are dreamers, there is always room to dream, but one should never forget the present struggle that exists in which some of us are not allowed to forget. For the battle is not in the clouds, it is on the ground. On the ground, rooted in everyday experiences. Some of the best things you can do as a friend is to think before you speak, consider another's story before your own story and respect those real "friendship" boundaries.
