My Dear White Friend, I have been thinking about antiracism- self-education.
I value your sudden, urgent hunger to understand my world. When you call me to ask about the latest headline, or when you pull me into a quiet corner at work to ask how a specific micro-aggression actually feels, I see your intent. You want to learn. You want to understand. You want to bridge a gap that perhaps you are only now beginning to recognise has always been there.
And I value that.
But I need you to step back for a moment and look at the invisible transaction taking place between us.
When you ask me to explain racism to you, you may be asking me to open an archive of lived experience that I did not choose to create. An archive of moments I have had to interpret, absorb, survive, minimise, rationalise and sometimes simply put away so that I could continue with my day.
To answer what may feel like a straightforward question, I may have to search through that archive. I have to decide what to retrieve, what to reveal and what to leave untouched. I may have to revisit a conversation I would rather forget, remember the expression on someone’s face, recall the moment I realised I was being treated differently, or reconstruct an experience I have spent years learning how to carry.
For you, it may be an illuminating fifteen-minute conversation. For me, it can be an exhumation of experiences I have spent a lifetime managing simply so that I can remain functional.
And that is something I need you to understand.
I am not asking you never to ask me questions about race. Some of our most important conversations may begin with a question. Friendship should make room for curiosity, vulnerability and learning.
But friendship does not automatically give you unlimited access to my emotional archive.
There is a difference between inviting conversation and assuming availability. There is a difference between asking because you genuinely value my perspective and asking because it is easier for me to explain racism to you than for you to do the difficult work of understanding it yourself.
Sometimes I will want to talk. Sometimes I will not. Sometimes I may simply say, “I cannot carry this conversation for you today.”
And what happens next matters.
I know what can happen in the silence that follows. I can sometimes see it in the slight tightening of your shoulders, or hear it in the sudden, heavy quiet over the phone. Something changes.
Perhaps your mind begins constructing a defence.
“But I was only trying to understand.”
“I thought you wanted people to ask questions.”
“If I cannot ask my friend, how am I supposed to learn?”
And almost without either of us noticing, the conversation moves. It is no longer about racism. It is no longer about my fatigue. It becomes about your discomfort.
Perhaps my boundary feels like criticism. Perhaps my saying, “I cannot do this today,” is heard somewhere inside you as, “You are not a good ally,” or “You have done something wrong,” or even, “You are one of those people.”
And suddenly you feel the need to explain your intentions, defend your character or demonstrate your goodness.
But my boundary is not necessarily an accusation. Sometimes it is simply a boundary.
This is one of the places where allyship becomes psychologically demanding. It is easy to remain curious when curiosity is rewarded with an answer. It is harder when your question meets a limit.
Can you stay in the room then? Can you tolerate the discomfort without withdrawing? Can you resist the urge to justify yourself? Can you resist making me responsible for reassuring you that you are still a good person?
Can you hear “no” without transforming it into rejection?
These quiet moments tell us something important about where our learning really is.
Within the Six Stages Framework, Emerging Awareness (+1) may produce questions. But becoming Engaged & Reflective (+4) asks something more of us. It asks whether we can examine what happens inside ourselves when our curiosity is interrupted, when our intentions are questioned, or when someone else’s boundary prevents us from resolving our discomfort immediately.
True allyship is not defined by never encountering a boundary. It is defined partly by what you do in the quiet seconds after one is drawn.
There is another question I want you to ask yourself.
Before you come to me, what have you already done?
When a question about race, bias or inequality occurs to you, is your first instinct to find the nearest Black person or person of colour who might explain it? Or do you first sit with the discomfort of not knowing?
Do you read? Do you listen? Do you research? Do you seek out the extensive work that people have already taken the time to write, record and publish? Do you invest your own time, energy and perhaps money in your education?
Because intentional allyship cannot depend upon minoritised people repeatedly reopening difficult experiences simply so that others can understand racism.
Your learning has a cost.
The question is: who is paying it?
Sometimes the cost should be yours.
Your time. Your reading. Your discomfort. Your uncertainty. Your willingness to discover that something you have believed for years may be incomplete. Your willingness to sit alone with a difficult idea rather than immediately asking someone else to make it easier to understand.
That does not diminish relationship. It protects it.
When you take responsibility for your own learning, our friendship becomes less transactional. I am no longer positioned as the person who supplies racial knowledge while you consume it. We can meet instead as two people capable of learning from one another.
But there is another question that may be even more difficult.
My dear White friend, how are you with other Black people when I am not there?
Not the Black people you already know. Not the colleagues whose credentials you have come to respect. Not the friend whose personality, history and intentions have become familiar enough that you no longer experience them as uncertain.
I mean the Black person you have just met.
The Black colleague who enters your professional space with expertise of their own. The Black woman whose confidence you have not yet learned how to interpret. The Black professional whose qualifications equal, or perhaps exceed, your own. The person who does not arrive already carrying your approval.
What happens then?
Do you offer them the same curiosity you offer me? Do you return their call? Do you make room for their expertise? Do you assume competence until there is evidence otherwise, or do they have to prove themselves to you first?
When they speak confidently, do you hear confidence or arrogance?
When they disagree with you, do you experience a professional difference of opinion, or something more threatening?
When they establish a boundary, are they assertive, or suddenly “difficult”?
When they enter a space in which you have established expertise, authority or recognition, can you welcome them without feeling that something is being taken from you?
These questions matter because there is a form of allyship that functions beautifully inside familiarity.
You know me.
You understand my humour.
You know something of my history.
Perhaps, over time, I have become safe to you.
But familiarity can sometimes conceal rather than eliminate bias.
It is possible to care deeply about one Black person while continuing to respond defensively, suspiciously or dismissively towards Black people you do not know.
It is possible for me to become the exception.
“You are not like the others.”
Perhaps no one ever says those words aloud.
They do not have to.
The exception can exist quietly in behaviour.
I receive the returned call. Someone else does not.
My expertise is recognised. Someone else’s is scrutinised.
My confidence is understood. Someone else’s becomes threatening.
My challenge is interpreted within the context of a relationship. From someone unfamiliar, the same challenge may suddenly be labelled aggressive, confrontational or difficult.
And this is why having a Black friend cannot, by itself, tell you very much about where you are in your anti-racism journey.
Neither can being knowledgeable about racism.
Neither can describing yourself as an ally.
The more difficult test is what happens when relationship, familiarity and affection are removed.
How do your values travel?
Do they travel into the meeting room?
Into recruitment?
Into professional competition?
Into whose email you answer?
Whose expertise you cite?
Whose ideas you amplify?
Whose mistakes you forgive?
Whose success you celebrate without experiencing it as a threat to your own?
Perhaps one of the most revealing questions you can ask yourself is this:
Am I an ally to Black people, or have I simply learned how to be an ally to the Black people I already know?
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
And, my dear friend, I do not want to become evidence that you have overcome your biases.
I want our friendship to make you more curious about the biases that may still surface when I am not in the room.
Because the real test of what you have learned from knowing me is not only how you treat me.
It is how you meet the next person.
And still, learning is not the destination.
Reading the books is not enough. Listening to the podcasts is not enough. Knowing the terminology is not enough.
You can become remarkably knowledgeable about racism while changing very little about the way you behave.
For a long time, the standard for being a “good ally” has often seemed strangely passive.
“I try not to offend.”
“I don’t say racist things.”
“I treat everyone the same.”
But avoiding harm is only the baseline.
It does not, by itself, create equity.
It does not necessarily create belonging.
And it does not automatically create psychological safety.
So perhaps the question should change from, “How do I avoid getting this wrong?” to, “What can I actively do that makes this environment safer, fairer and more affirming?”
This is where I want us to think about micro-validations.
If microaggressions are the small, sometimes easily dismissed interactions through which people can be diminished, overlooked or positioned as outsiders, micro-validations move deliberately in the opposite direction.
They are small, intentional acts that communicate: I see you. I heard what you said. Your contribution matters. You belong here.
A micro-validation might mean supporting a colleague’s point when it has been overlooked and then credited to someone else. It might mean noticing who is repeatedly interrupted in meetings. It might mean checking in after a distressing public event without requiring the person affected to explain the history, politics and psychology of what has happened.
It might mean challenging something when the person most affected is not in the room.
It might mean creating environments in which people do not have to wear a mask of conformity simply to establish basic safety.
That is when learning starts to become behaviour.
And behaviour is where allyship becomes visible.
My dear friend, I do not want your response to this letter to be, “Fine. I just won’t ask anything anymore.”
That would miss the point entirely.
I am not asking you to stop being curious. I am asking you to become more thoughtful about what your curiosity requires of other people.
I am not asking you to stop talking to me about racism. I am asking you to notice whether you have quietly made me responsible for teaching you about it.
I am not asking you to know everything before we speak. I am asking you to arrive having already done some of the work.
And when I do share something with you, perhaps the most important question is not simply, “What have I learned?”
It is:
“What will I do differently because I have learned it?”
Because the purpose of understanding racism is not to become more sophisticated at talking about racism.
It is to become more capable of recognising it, responding to it and helping to create something different.
So perhaps the next time a question rises in you, pause before reaching for me.
Ask yourself: Can I find part of this answer myself?
Am I asking for information, or am I asking another person to carry my discomfort?
Have I checked whether they have the capacity for this conversation?
How do I respond when someone sets a boundary?
How do I behave towards Black people who are unfamiliar to me?
Do my values survive disagreement, competition, status and uncertainty?
And once I understand more, what responsibility follows?
Before our next conversation, I invite you to sit with four questions and answer them with absolute honesty.
Think about the last time you asked a minoritised friend or colleague about racism, bias or a difficult public event. Did you consider what remembering and explaining might cost them emotionally?
If someone tells you they do not have the capacity to talk about race, what happens inside you? Curiosity? Embarrassment? Rejection? Resentment? Defensiveness? What might that reaction be telling you?
Think about the Black people you encounter who are not your friends, who are unfamiliar to you, who may disagree with you, compete with you or enter spaces in which you already hold status. Do they receive the same openness, generosity and presumption of competence that I receive from you?
And finally, think of something important you have learned about racism during the past year.
What changed in your behaviour because you learned it?
Perhaps that is the question I most want you to carry with you:
If learning changes what you know, but never changes what you do, what exactly has been learned?
Paying the cost of your own lessons does not mean learning alone forever.
It means taking responsibility for becoming someone who can enter our conversations having already begun the work.
Then perhaps our friendship can become something richer than teacher and pupil.
Something more reciprocal.
A place where neither of us has to perform.
Neither of us has to defend our goodness.
Neither of us has to carry the whole weight of the lesson.
And both of us can show up more fully, safely and authentically as ourselves.
With care and hope for our shared journey,
Dr Shungu
https://www.sixstagesframework.com/category/through-the-ssf-lens/?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35097059/?
https://www.apa.org/topics/implicit-bias
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