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news analysis

The ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black’ Defense

It’s a myth that proximity to blackness immunizes white people from doing racist things.

Credit...Richie Pope

Mr. Eligon is a national correspondent for The New York Times.

The people in the town where Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor, grew up want you to know that black and white people got along just fine when he was a kid there in the 1960s and ’70s.

His high school in Onancock, a fishing village on the state’s Eastern Shore, was evenly split between black and white students. They played basketball and football together, went crabbing and fishing and shared the counter at Wise’s Drugstore.

They want you to know that Mr. Northam, 59 and white, did not have “a racist bone in his body” because, well, he had black friends.

“He is the last person on earth that would be racist,” one of Mr. Northam’s white childhood friends, Harry Mears, told me when I visited Onancock recently. “We have just as many black friends together as we do white friends.”

That’s why those who knew him well say he could not have had any bigoted intentions when he darkened his face with shoe polish to dress like Michael Jackson for a dance contest in 1984. It’s highly unlikely, they say, that he would put a photo on his medical school yearbook page of a man in blackface standing next to someone wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Mr. Northam’s defenders are channeling a tried and true myth: the belief that proximity to blackness immunizes white people from having attitudes that are rooted in racism or doing racist things.

In other words, they’re offering, on his behalf, the “some of my best friends are black” defense, which has so often been relied on by those facing accusations of racism that it has become shorthand for weak denials of bigotry — a punch line about the absence of thoughtfulness and rigor in our conversations about racism.

A recent example: In the wake of President Trump’s comments that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist rally where a participant killed a counterprotester, Mr. Trump’s attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, tweeted, “Just because I support @POTUS @realDonaldTrump doesn’t make me a racist.”

It was accompanied by a collage of photos of Mr. Cohen with black people. The subtext was clear: Some of my best friends are black. Mr. Cohen was thoroughly mocked on social media, but his response revealed a common line of reasoning: Why would anyone share a laugh, meal or kiss with black people if he thought poorly of them? How could he invite them into his home if he saw them as inferior?

This thinking, scholars say, is steeped in complicated social factors, from a reluctance to have blunt conversations about race to a failure to acknowledge racial difference altogether. That’s why, after a white person’s proclamation that he has black friends often comes an insistence that he doesn’t see color, a trait that some of Mr. Northam’s friends declared was a virtue of those in their community.

Mr. Northam has been deeply apologetic for his racist missteps and said he has a lot to learn, but he did give a nod to his black friends the day after the racist yearbook photo surfaced.

“I was in public school during desegregation,” he said during a news conference, at which his discomfort discussing race showed at times. “I have a lot of African-American friends that I went to school with, played ball with, and I suspect I’ve had as much exposure to people of color as anybody.”

So how could someone with so much exposure to black people still use blackface? How could he do something that reflected — under the most generous interpretation — such obliviousness and insensitivity to a well-known symbol of America’s racist history?

“You live in a society that’s constantly giving you messages of white as the ideal,” said Robin DiAngelo, the author of “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.” So a white person can develop a close bond with someone who is black but still come away feeling superior to African-Americans and harboring racist stereotypes, Ms. DiAngelo added.

That complicates an ideal that many hold dear: integration. Living among and interacting with people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, scholars tell us, is supposed to help us understand one another better and bridge racial divides.

But building meaningful relationships across the color line can be difficult, in large part because race remains a touchy subject. Many white people are uncomfortable talking about race or defensive against accusations of racism, according to academics. Oftentimes, they’re just not equipped to do it, said Debby Irving, a racial justice writer who is white. Instead of listening and offering support, they tend to make the conversations about themselves, said Ms. Irving, the author of “Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race.”

“If anybody’s in distress, who do you call?” she asked. “White people will very rarely be that for a person of color unless that white person has done work in understanding racism.”

Absent deep, honest conversations about race with their black friends, white people can be left with superficial relationships and without a real understanding of how race plays out in a black person’s daily life. “Having black acquaintances and having black friends is different,” said Nick Adams, a television writer who is black and the author of the book “Making Friends With Black People.”

But sometimes it’s the relationships that white people have with black friends that can lead them astray. They can be lulled into a false sense of familiarity that might have them pushing boundaries better left untouched.

“Know the line,” Michael Harriot wrote in a semisatirical article in The Root that offered seven rules for white people with black friends. “While you might come from a long line of habitual line steppers, please know that there are some thresholds you cannot cross.”

Ms. DiAngelo said she once crossed that line, in a meeting with three black women, two of whom were close friends and another who had been hired as a consultant to design their website. Ms. DiAngelo told the consultant that her friend — one of the other women sitting right with them in the meeting — had a bad experience conducting racial justice training at a mostly white company. Feeling at ease, and eager to convey her understanding of how racism played out in that professional environment, Ms. DiAngelo joked that the company probably did not want her black colleague to return because “her hair must have scared the white people.”

It was only later, when one of her co-workers told her that the remark had offended the consultant that Ms. DiAngelo said she realized that her closeness with two of the black women in the meeting had lulled her into being too comfortable.

“I just kind of took for granted a relationship that I did not have,” she said.

The black friend as a buffer dates to the days of slave owners painting a false narrative that they were beloved by the African-Americans they subjugated. The slave owners “sought to justify how their racial hierarchy harmonized relationships between a dominant (white) race against a subordinate (black) race,” Tyler Parry, an associate professor in African-American studies at California State University, Fullerton, wrote in the Black Perspectives blog.

Mr. Parry recounted how George Fitzhugh, a supporter of slavery, blamed Northern abolitionists for interfering, saying in 1854 that the white Southerner “is the Negro’s friend, his only friend.” After Emancipation, Mr. Parry wrote, a white Southern belle lamented the loss of black “friends, those we loved, and those who loved us.”

People whose careers center on examining and repairing racial inequality tend to say that being willing to see color, and talking about what it means, is one part of how white people can turn their black friendships into something that broadens their horizons on race.

“Unless one increases their conscious awareness of U.S. racist history and connects the historical dots to the continued, present-day effects of our societal order, one cannot even begin to understand, much less address, the issues of racism in America,” Kimberly Norwood, a professor of law and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email.

In his efforts to atone so far, Mr. Northam has struggled to show a command of black history and the language to talk about race. He called the first Africans brought to Virginia 400 years ago “indentured servants,” and though there is debate about whether he was technically correct, it was a tone-deaf statement that drew criticism. Some people found the way he discussed moonwalking like Michael Jackson during an apology news conference to be distasteful.

But at that same news conference, he also seemed to tacitly acknowledge that his black friendships growing up may not have given him the racial understanding he thought he had.

A reporter pressed him on how it was that he could have had so much exposure to black people yet have been so unaware of the hurt that wearing blackface would cause. He thought about it for a beat.

“I have made mistakes in my life,” he said. “And I will continue to learn.”

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John Eligon is a Kansas City-based national correspondent covering race. He previously worked as a reporter in Sports and Metro, and his work has taken him to Nelson Mandela's funeral in South Africa and the Winter Olympics in Turin. More about John Eligon

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: The ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black’ Defense. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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