When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, we lived in a racially mixed neighborhood. Many of our neighbors and most of my childhood friends were Mexican-American. I spent many summer days with Mike, Marco and Steve. We fought with one another almost as much as we played with one another. Everything changed when I graduated from elementary school. My family became Christian and not long after I was enrolled in a Christian school several miles away.
In one year, I went from a very racially diverse school, to an almost all white school. It’s often said that Sundays are the most segregated day in America. Well, because I went to a Christian school, my whole week was pretty much segregated. It’s something of an irony. My parents paid dearly so I could receive a Christian education, and yet I cannot help but wonder whether I would have received a better “Christian” education at a more economically and racially diverse school.
How much of a faith-based education should be about encountering people from different backgrounds, rather than simply about studying the Bible?
Thankfully, I’m now at church which is pretty diverse, with people of many different races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, for the most part, in my forty odd years of going to church, the last three years have been the exception to the rule. Historically, the most ethnically diverse places of my life were most definitely not in the church, but rather in my neighborhood and in my workplace.
This past week, I read an interesting article in Salon, by Brittney Cooper. In her article, Ms. Cooper reflects on a recent Reuters poll which found that 40% of whites and 25% of nonwhites have no friends of the opposite race (These numbers actually seem high to me). Cooper used the occasion to talk about the difficulties and challenges of interracial friendship.
Even as children, we’re segregated by race, much like my own parents segregated me from the kids in our neighborhood. There was no explicitly racist intent behind it, but the effect was to keep me separate from people of color and in retrospect, I don’t doubt that I was poorer for it.
Interracial friendships don’t get any easier as we get older. As Cooper shares in her article, age often brings a kind of drifting apart. Life no longer revolves around play. Culture and what our friends think become more important. I still remember how my old friend Mike Ojeda would often tell me that my mother’s Indonesian cooking smelled really bad. “It stinks!” I also remember how Mike’s remarks offended me and how Mike didn’t really care about the effect of his words. It bothered me even then. These little cultural sensitivities only grow with age.
Cooper commented in her article:
(I)nterracial friendships, especially in adulthood, require a level of risk and vulnerability that many of us would rather simply not deal with. And that is perhaps one of racism’s biggest casualties: Beyond the level of systemic havoc that racism wreaks on the material lives of people of color, in a million and one ways every day, it reduces the opportunity of all people to be more human.
Although Cooper doesn’t say it outright, she tells us what we might have already known, that we largely like to have friendships with people who look, think and act like us. We want to be with people who share our culture and background. This becomes a safe harbor for us.
I’ve lived long enough to have said more than few stupid things to my friends. I’ve also lived long enough to have had people say incredibly stupid things to me. While I appreciate the truth of Coopers’ comments, I also understand that it goes deeper. Yes, interracial friendships are hard, but friendships in general are incredibly hard, even without the challenges of those “little things” like culture and race.
Like dating, forming new friendships can be awkward and halting. It can be filled with missteps and mistakes. It requires a fair amount of patience and persistence. As Cooper states , it also requires a willingness to take risks and be vulnerable. This is far from easy, and more than a few people have preferred seclusion, rather than pursue the risk of these “dangerous” relationships.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but think that this is what it means to be a person of faith. As a follower of Jesus, we take risks and we make ourselves vulnerable. We also love our neighbor, are forgiving and give grace to others. To paraphrase the Lord’s prayer, we forgive our debtors in the same way that we want God to forgive us. In this respect, despite the challenges, interracial friendships offer us the opportunity to live out the gospel.
What have you learned from your own interracial or cross-cultural friendships?
