Requiem for an Antiracist Friend

I have written in multiple places about my complicated relationships with the white friends of my youth.

Facebook is the place where high school friendships go to die. But only after an excruciating drama in which you discover that the political differences so easily set to the side as children now constitute a critical dividing line, a policed border of sorts.

Ashley and I did Facebook friendship in reverse. We largely steered clear of each other in high school. With her freckles, aquiline nose always slightly pointed in the air, and her clear teenage disdain for the lot of us, Ashley always seemed too cool for school. And though we both were whip smart, no-nonsense girls, I was awkward. She was not. And we didn’t run in the same circles.

In May 2007, we became friends on Facebook, but didn’t interact much. At some point, my frequent rants and increasing profile as a writer about all things racism and white supremacy, caught her attention.

On November 12, 2010, Ashley DM’d me for the first time.

“Brittney, I am constantly challenged to thought by your posts. I am a 100% whitebread(bred) honey raising two deep Southern white girls. What do I need to teach them about race and feminism that I don’t get? …. Brittney, I know you are so busy, but would you send me a short outline of “what white girls need in this world to be compassionate and understanding?” I want to be able to be a part of changes rather than problems. I know that nobody can fix everything but anybody can fix something. Do you have any teaching points for me?”

I know that our current stance is that white people should educate themselves, and that it shouldn’t be the job of people of color to teach anybody about anything. I concur. But also, this shit is never not complicated. Whenever I give talks at universities, somebody in the audience, usually a Black woman, always asks me about the burden of having to teach white folks about race, or the burden of having to be in community with well-meaning, but exhausting white people.

For the last decade, whenever I have answered this question, I have always thought of Ashley. I have just a handful of other white women that I call friends. A decade ago, when she DM’d me, I wouldn’t have said even that. But those white women have already figured out what anti-racism looks like in practice. I am not called upon to do the emotional labor of teaching them.

For Ashley, I made an exception. I did so because I’m a sucker for sincerity, I have a problem telling people no, and I’m an educator at heart. Also, I have never not resented the ways that racism steps in and warps everything making it so hard to connect across difference. Despite my righteous indignation as I have endured former white childhood friends defriending me, branding me too radical, or absurdly concluding that I am “the racist now,” to say that I didn’t feel at least a twinge of grief at the dissolution of those connections might be a bit dishonest. At the very least I grieved the loss of possibility in the ways those former friends rejected the invitation to think differently, choosing instead to see me as the problem.

Ashley saw the invitation to be and to do better in every single one of my many many rants. And she accepted it. When I scrolled back through 11 years of DMs, in those early days, as she navigated it, she didn’t always get it right. Sometimes she would ask if the way she thought about something was offensive. Sometimes it absolutely was. I told her so.

But what I also did was thank her for listening, because as I told her in 2011, “not many people have.”

I have had many other interactions with former white girls with whom I was actually friends in those same DMs over these years. Every one of those friendships no longer exists. Ashley outlasted them all.

Every time a Black woman asks me how to determine how much labor she should do around antiracism in her personal friendships, I point to my friendship with Ashley. She was a friend who was drawn to the mirror I held up. She came closer, attracted to rather than repelled by the work of being anti-racist. She asked for what she needed, vulnerable enough to understand that I might very well say no, yet understanding that I was a person who could help.

So we built a friendship. She could ask my thoughts on things. She let me talk crazy to her Trump-supporting friends. She challenged their racism. And because friendship isn’t friendship without reciprocity, sometimes she would text me or DM and say, I’m praying for you. She never meant it in that weaponized way that church folks of all stripes say to people when they disagree. She prayed regularly for my health and well-being, as I try to do the work I feel divinely directed to do. We’re both church girls, and I believe in the power of intercession, so I accepted it as one of her offerings to our friendship.

On November 12, 2021, exactly 11 years after that first DM, I ordered a flower arrangement for Ashley’s funeral. She died tragically and unexpectedly last week.

Not even one full month ago, we had been texting each other about some hometown gossip. I still don’t have the words, at least not any that I could render artfully.

I grieve the loss of my friend.

Like any real friend does, she saw me. I was not to her some racist monstrosity spouting mean nonsense because I allegedly hate white people. She recognized me as the girl she grew up with, a Black girl from our small town deep South life with big opinions, and a big heart, and a take no bullshit disposition.  She respected it, perhaps because at base, even when confrontational, it was honest.

She did not expect me to lay aside racism in service of our friendship. She understood that that was no friendship at all. She did not think that we merely had a political difference of opinion. She understood that if I was right about some of the things I said, that this meant she was wrong. In fact, she understood that an active commitment to confronting and challenging racism in herself and those around her, were reasonable asks for anybody committed to living in a loving way towards everybody. She never asked me to mute my critiques or turn down my fire. Real friends never do.

She listened. And then she listened some more. And she never performed for me. She always told me what she really thought, making space to change her mind, and to grow. And as she did that, she allowed me not to paint the place and the people I came from with one broad dismissive brush. Ruston, Louisiana has produced lots of people with politics I don’t like. But it also produced me with my radical Black feminist country girl Jesus loving self. And it produced Ashley too. An antiracist white girl, trying as she told me, to not raise racist daughters.

I’m not ready to end this essay, because I am not ready for our friendship to be done.

So I will say simply, thank you for being my friend, Ashley. Thank you for using your life to stand in the gap for all the white people we know who do not yet get it. I will always remember you in my work, and I will always commend you as an example to others. Faith is “the substance of what we hope for.” As that goes, you were certainly the substance of what I have hoped for in my friendships with white girls. And because of how you intentionally showed up, you restored just a little bit of my faith in the notion that the work of antiracism is not all for naught.

You made me work, Girl. And the blessing of your friendship was absolutely worth it.