What happens when friendship, allyship and inclusion no longer reassure us, but ask us to examine ourselves? In Letter Two, the discomfort of looking within becomes both personal and institutional.
Editorial note: My Dear White Friend draws upon lived experience, memory and reflective inquiry. Identifying details are changed, generalised or omitted. While individual experiences may prompt particular reflections, the “White friend” across the series should not be understood as one person. The letters may draw upon different relationships, encounters, conversations and questions that have emerged over many years.
My dear White friend,
I know it has been some time since my last letter. I hope you received my note between letters.
I have been wanting to write to you for some time, but things have been rather difficult and I have needed time to stop and process.
Forgive me if this letter is long. You do not have to read it in one sitting. I have included headings so that you can return to it when you are ready.
There is a great deal I want to talk to you about.
Proximity Is Not the Same as Reflection
Does having Black friends mean that you have examined your own racial bias?
It sounds like a simple question.
Perhaps even an uncomfortable one.
Because I know you will agree that friendship matters.
Relationships matter.
Knowing people whose lives and experiences are different from our own can enlarge our understanding of the world.
We listen.
We learn.
We share homes, meals, celebrations, disappointments and histories.
We may love one another deeply.
Surely that must count for something.
It does.
But I have been wondering whether sometimes we ask friendship to prove something it cannot prove.
I have Black friends.
Therefore:
I cannot be racist.
And, almost without noticing it, another conclusion can follow:
Therefore I do not need to examine myself.
I do not need to do the work.
That is where I want to linger for a while.
Because proximity is not the same as reflection.
Knowing Black people may expose us to experiences different from our own.
Reflection asks something more.
It asks:
What has knowing Black people caused me to reconsider about myself?
What assumptions have I had to question?
What have I learned about the world that I did not previously see?
What have I learned about my own culture?
My own privilege?
My own reactions to difference?
And perhaps most importantly:
What happens when the Black person I know and care about tells me something about race that I do not want to hear?
That is where friendship can become much more psychologically demanding.
It is relatively easy to value difference when difference does not disturb our understanding of ourselves.
It becomes harder when someone we love says:
That experience was racialised.
You may not have noticed what happened there.
Something you said affected me differently from how you intended it.
The environment we both experienced was not the same environment for me.
What happens then?
Do I become curious?
Or do I reach quickly for evidence that reassures me?
But I have Black friends.
But I have always treated everyone the same.
But you know me.
But I am a good person.
The Good Person Defence
Perhaps that last sentence matters more than we realise.
I am a good person.
We all like to think of ourselves as good people.
Of course, most of us want to believe that.
But if we understand racial bias only through a simple moral equation —
racist = bad person
and
I = good person
— then the possibility that racial bias might operate within us becomes almost impossible to tolerate.
The conversation is no longer about an assumption, a behaviour or an impact.
It begins to feel like a judgement of our entire character.
And then defensiveness makes sense.
Not because there is nothing to examine.
But because examination itself begins to feel intolerable — perhaps even dangerous.
If acknowledging bias means becoming a “bad person”, there is a powerful psychological incentive not to see the bias at all.
Perhaps this is one reason the lens can be so difficult to turn inward.
The Six Stages Framework developmental model similarly places curiosity, meaningful conversation, reflection and the willingness to challenge our own perceptions at the heart of movement towards deeper understanding.
When the Question Gets Bigger
My dear White friend, I have been thinking about this even more in recent days.
The public discussion following the tragic death of Professor Jason Arday has stirred something in me. His death followed a period of intense public and professional scrutiny, although important questions and competing interpretations remain around what happened before it.
I want to be careful here.
I cannot tell you everything that happened in Professor Arday’s life.
I cannot know what was happening inside him.
Nor can I take one person’s tragedy and use it as proof of conclusions arising from my own experiences.
What I can tell you is what the conversations surrounding his death have caused me to think about.
They have made me think about patterns I have observed.
About how systems behave.
About what can happen when someone experiences exclusion, scrutiny or the feeling of being pushed towards the margins.
They have made me think about institutions.
Professions.
Leadership.
Belonging.
Scrutiny.
Silence.
Allyship.
And what happens when an organisation that believes itself to be fair and inclusive is confronted with experiences that disturb that understanding.
Because perhaps organisations have their own version of:
But I am a good person.
It sounds more like:
We are an inclusive organisation.
We value diversity.
We have an anti-racism strategy.
We have Black staff.
We celebrate Black History Month.
We have a diversity committee.
We have policies.
We have training.
Perhaps even:
We excel in everything we do.
All of those things may matter.
But just as having a Black friend does not remove the need for personal reflection, having an equality, diversity or belonging policy does not remove the need for institutional reflection.
I have explored this gap between stated organisational values and people’s actual experiences elsewhere in Beyond the Mask of Tolerance.
The question remains:
What happens when somebody tells the organisation that their lived experience does not match the organisation’s description of itself?
Do we become curious?
Or do we reach for evidence that reassures us?
What Do You Really See?
My dear White friend, when you look at who reaches the most senior positions in the professions and institutions you know, what do you see?
Who is present?
Who is repeatedly absent?
Who is encouraged?
Who is sponsored?
Whose potential is recognised?
Who is considered “ready”?
Whose leadership style is regarded as confident?
And whose is experienced as intimidating?
Who gets the benefit of the doubt?
Who has mistakes treated as part of learning?
And whose mistakes begin to look like evidence that perhaps they were never good enough to be there?
When you notice the low numbers of Black people in senior positions or within academia, does it trouble you?
The disparity is not simply something we imagine. Advance HE’s 2024 staff equality data reported that just 3.8% of UK Black academics were professors.
Do you wonder why?
If you have held positions of influence for many years, what has made it difficult to challenge those patterns?
Was it uncertainty?
Competing priorities?
Fear of getting it wrong?
Or had the absence simply become so familiar that it no longer demanded attention?
Sometimes exclusion does not announce itself as exclusion.
It can live within the ordinary processes of professional life, hiding in the shadows.
The conversations in corridors.
The informal recommendations.
The references.
The appointments.
The invitations.
The reputations that travel.
The concerns whispered between people who trust one another.
The person described as “difficult”.
The person said not to be “a good fit”.
The person who does not represent the image we have of who should occupy that role.
The person whose challenge is remembered long after the issue they raised has been forgotten.
And the absence of Black people from senior spaces can become so familiar that eventually nobody thinks to ask why.
This is also why I have increasingly argued that we have to look beneath visible outcomes towards the conditions that produce them — something I explore through the SSF Bias Impact Tree.
What I Know Is This
There have been moments in my own professional life when experiences of scrutiny, exclusion and professional isolation became overwhelming.
I do not need to reconstruct those experiences here.
Some belong to another time.
Some involve other people’s stories as well as mine.
Some have been sealed shut and cannot be told.
But recent events have brought back more memories than I expected.
Things I thought I had made peace with.
Questions I thought I had put away.
Relationships I had pushed quietly towards the back of my mind.
And so many “what ifs”.
What if somebody had spoken?
What if somebody had asked another question?
What if somebody had been willing to say:
Something about this does not feel right.
What if professional neutrality had not always required silence?
What if people who privately expressed sympathy had been willing to say something publicly when it mattered?
I cannot rewrite those moments.
But I can ask what they teach me now.
And what they enable me to see.
The White Privilege Fence
And this is where another image has been forming in my mind.
A fence.
Perhaps a White privilege fence.
My dear White friend, what does the view look like from up there?
From the fence, perhaps you can see something troubling happening without feeling that you have enough information to become involved.
You look one way:
It is not really my role.
You look the other:
I don’t know enough about what happened.
You look again:
There are probably two sides.
And again:
I need to remain professional.
I don’t want to make things worse.
Someone more senior will deal with it.
It isn’t appropriate for me to interfere.
Each explanation may sound perfectly reasonable.
And sometimes it will be reasonable.
Not every disagreement is racism.
Not every allegation is correct.
Not every situation requires us to take a position before we understand it.
But there is still a question worth asking:
At what point does reasonable caution become habitual non-involvement?
How long can we sit on the fence before our silence becomes part of what allows something to continue?
And perhaps there is something particularly revealing about what happens after tragedy.
Suddenly the position seems clearer.
People post messages.
They express solidarity.
They attend vigils.
They write:
Rest in power.
They speak about injustice.
They say something must change.
And perhaps those expressions are completely sincere.
I do not want to dismiss them.
But I find myself asking a more uncomfortable question:
Where was your solidarity when solidarity carried a cost?
Where was it when the person sitting beside you was struggling?
Where was it when somebody in our own team was repeatedly described as difficult?
Where was it when a Black colleague’s experience did not fit comfortably with the organisation’s preferred account of itself?
Where was it when challenging what was happening might have disturbed our own relationships, reputation or position?
Public solidarity after a tragedy matters.
But surely allyship has to mean something before the tragedy too.
The Discomfort of Looking Back
Perhaps this is why the conversations surrounding Professor Arday have affected me so deeply.
They have not only made me look at what is happening now.
They have made me look back.
And through the passage of time, I find myself seeing some experiences differently.
Seeing racial bias where I may once have struggled to name it.
Seeing undermining.
Seeing dehumanisation.
Seeing things that perhaps I could not fully see while I was living through them.
Interestingly, names from my own professional past have resurfaced.
People I had not forgotten exactly, but whom I had placed towards the back of my mind.
Some have appeared again through professional networks.
And I have found myself wondering whether these recent conversations have stirred memories for them too.
Do they remember certain moments differently now?
Do they ever wonder what I may have been experiencing?
Do they wonder what became of me?
Do they revisit decisions, silences, conversations or relationships from the past?
Do they feel any discomfort?
Regret?
Perhaps even guilt?
Does the view from the White privilege fence look different with the benefit of time?
I cannot know.
And it would be wrong for me to claim that I do.
What I do know is what has happened within me.
Sadness has surfaced.
Anger.
Recognition.
Grief.
Questions.
And those persistent “what ifs”.
Would I have been treated the same way if I had been White?
Would more people have spoken up if I had been White?
Perhaps this is another dimension of looking within.
Sometimes we are not being asked only to examine what we are doing now.
Sometimes we are being asked to reconsider what we did — or did not do — then.
Knowing what I know now, would I have acted differently?
That is not an easy question.
But perhaps it is an important one.
Friendship Is Not Exemption
My dear White friend, I have always hoped that friendship might mean you could see me fully — that my Blackness would not become a reason to overlook my humanity or diminish my professionalism.
And yet I sometimes wonder whether this is part of what happens when we encounter difference.
Do we sometimes become so focused on a person’s race, disability, gender, class or some other aspect of difference that we stop seeing the whole human being standing in front of us?
Certainly, there were moments in my own life when that is how it felt.
And looking back now, I find myself wondering whether Professor Jason Arday ever experienced something similar — the painful possibility of being seen first through difference rather than simply as a human being and a professional.
I cannot know that this was his experience.
But the question has stayed with me.
My dear White friend, none of this means that friendship across race is meaningless.
Quite the opposite.
Perhaps close relationships offer some of our richest opportunities for learning.
But only if we allow those relationships to challenge us.
A Black friend is not evidence of exemption from bias.
A Black partner is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Raising Black or mixed-race children is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Working with Black colleagues is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Doing anti-racism work is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Calling ourselves an ally is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Remaining a bystander while someone is being humiliated or excluded — while reassuring ourselves that we are not responsible because we are not the person directly causing it — is not evidence of exemption from bias.
Nor does working in a caring profession, or one committed to equity, make that profession exempt from scrutiny.
These relationships, identities, professions and commitments may instead offer us something far more valuable:
an opportunity to notice what we might otherwise never have seen — and perhaps what we have allowed ourselves to turn away from seeing.
But opportunity is not the same as transformation.
The question is what we do when something becomes visible.
Do we reach for the relationship as proof that the problem cannot be us?
Or are we willing to look at the discomfort and examine what it might be telling us?
Because discomfort does not necessarily mean an accusation is correct.
Reflection does not require unquestioning agreement.
And curiosity does not mean abandoning our own perspective.
It means remaining open long enough to ask:
Could there be something here that I have not yet understood?
Something that I have allowed myself not to see?
Those questions are very different from:
How do I prove that this cannot possibly be about me?
Perhaps this is where some conversations break.
One person is trying to describe an experience.
The other is trying to protect an identity.
One is saying:
Can you look at what happened?
The other hears:
You are a bad person.
And suddenly both people are talking about different things.
The experience disappears.
The defence takes over.
The lens turns away.
Back to My First Letter
My dear White friend, in my first letter — When Understanding Racism Becomes Personal, I asked:
What became so difficult that losing the friendship became easier than remaining in the conversation?
Perhaps this second letter brings me closer to one possible part of the answer.
Not the answer.
I still cannot know what was happening inside another person.
I cannot know what was happening inside you.
But perhaps some conversations about race become so difficult because they ask us to surrender the protection of certainty.
They ask us to tolerate the possibility that two things can be true at the same time.
I can be kind and carry bias.
I can love someone and misunderstand something important about their experience.
I can oppose racism and still reproduce racial assumptions.
I can do anti-racism work and still have work to do.
I can work within an organisation committed to inclusion and still participate in exclusion.
I can remain silent without intending harm and still need to examine what my silence allowed.
I can attend a vigil, express solidarity after tragedy, and still need to ask whether I have turned away from exclusion or intolerance in my own profession, workplace or community.
Those are not necessarily contradictions.
They are part of being human within societies and institutions in which race, gender, class, disability and other forms of difference continue to shape how we see and are seen.
Perhaps the question is not whether we can somehow become people — or organisations — that are beyond bias.
Perhaps the more meaningful question is:
What happens when bias, exclusion or inequity becomes visible?
Do we defend?
Do we retreat?
Do we reach for evidence of our goodness?
Do we climb onto the fence?
Or can we become curious?
Can we look again?
Can we allow a relationship, an organisation or a profession not simply to reassure us about who we already believe ourselves to be, but occasionally to disturb that certainty?
Perhaps friendship does not prove that bias is absent.
Perhaps one of friendship’s greatest gifts is that, sometimes, it allows bias to become visible.
And perhaps institutions do not demonstrate their commitment to inclusion by insisting that exclusion could not possibly be happening within them.
Perhaps they demonstrate it by what they do when somebody tells them that it is.
Are You Willing to Look?
So, my dear White friend, I find myself returning to the same question.
Not:
Are you a good person?
Not:
Are you an ally?
Not even:
Are you anti-racist?
But:
Are you willing to look?
Can you look at the human being without allowing their Blackness to prevent you from seeing everything else that they are?
Can you remain in the discomfort long enough to become curious?
And when the posts stop, the vigils end and everyone returns to work —
where will you sit?
With affection,
Shungu
Read. Listen. Reflect.
Continue exploring the My Dear White Friend series.
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