Letter One: When Understanding Racism Becomes Personal
Editorial note: My Dear White Friend draws upon lived experience, memory and reflective inquiry. Some identifying details have been 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 and questions that have emerged over many years.
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My dear White friend,
I have been thinking about something you said to me many years ago.
You once said something to the effect that, by the time we met when I was young, I was already “almost fully formed”.
Those words—or at least what I remember of them—have stayed with me.
At the time, I am not sure I understood what they meant. Perhaps you did not fully know either. But over the years I have returned to them, particularly as I have written and spoken more openly about racism.
I sometimes wonder what you saw when you met that young Black girl.
There was diversity around me, but my immediate social world was predominantly White.
I fitted in.
I was trusted.
I was treated as mature.
In many ways, I was given freedoms and responsibilities beyond what might ordinarily have been expected of someone so young.
Much of that felt positive.
Looking back, however, I can also ask different questions.
I was still young and often treated as older and more capable than I perhaps should have needed to be.
Years later, when we spoke about adultification and I began wondering whether my being seen as unusually mature might deserve re-examination, I remember us struggling to find common ground.
Perhaps neither of us had the language for it then.
Perhaps the adults around us did not either.
And perhaps that is part of the difficulty of reflection.
Sometimes we have to return to experiences we thought we understood and allow ourselves to see them differently.
I have also wondered about what each of us brought into our friendship.
What had we already learned about race?
What had we learned about belonging?
What had we learned about difference?
What assumptions were already sitting quietly in the room before either of us had the language to recognise them?
I do not know what knowing me challenged, confirmed or complicated for you.
And I do not want to construct an explanation on your behalf.
But I wonder.
Did knowing me become evidence that racism belonged somewhere else?
Did our friendship reassure us that race did not really matter between us?
Did my belonging comfortably within a predominantly White social world make it easier not to question that world too closely?
Was I, perhaps, easier to understand when my Blackness did not require anything of you?
And then, many years later, I began writing openly about racism.
That seemed to create a difficulty between us.
I remember being asked why I felt the need to write about it.
At times, I experienced my writing about racism as becoming something personal between us.
And eventually, our friendship reached a place where conversation stopped.
One of the hardest things for me is that, even now, I am not entirely sure what became irreconcilable.
Was it our conversation about adultification?
Was it our discussion about White privilege?
Was it our exploration of White fragility?
Was it something else entirely?
I genuinely do not know.
And so I have been left not with an answer, but with questions.
What became so difficult that losing the friendship became easier than remaining in the conversation?
Was it the suggestion that racism could have shaped my life despite everything I had achieved?
Was it the possibility that environments we had inhabited together were not as racially neutral as we might once have assumed?
Was it difficult to separate the idea of White privilege from an accusation of being a bad person?
Or did my speaking about racism unsettle something much more personal—the story we had carried about ourselves and our friendship?
Perhaps there had been an unspoken understanding:
We were friends.
You accepted me.
I belonged.
Race did not divide us.
And perhaps, somewhere within that story, there was another assumption:
Therefore racism could not really have existed here.
But friendship does not necessarily remove race.
Love does not necessarily remove bias.
Proximity does not necessarily create understanding.
A person can truthfully say:
I have Black friends.
I loved a Black person.
A Black person trusted me.
I married a Black person.
I raised, fostered or adopted Black children.
I have always welcomed Black people into my home.
I do anti-racism work.
I teach other people about racism.
I consider myself an ally.
All of those things can be true.
And still there may be more to examine.
Sometimes, perhaps, the very things we use as evidence of our inclusivity can become the things that protect us from further scrutiny.
None of us is automatically immune from implicit bias, simply because of who we are, who we know or what work we do.
Recently I read a reflection that stopped me.
The writer observed that understanding White privilege intellectually is one thing; scrutinising it, sitting with it and unpicking it within ourselves is something else entirely.
I think that distinction matters.
Knowing about racism is one thing.
Knowing that racism exists somewhere outside ourselves can be relatively comfortable.
We can condemn racist language.
We can distance ourselves from explicitly racist people.
We can read books, attend training, support campaigns and describe ourselves as anti-racist.
But what happens when the lens turns inward?
What happens when someone we love tells us that race shaped an experience we thought we shared?
What happens when the issue is no longer those racist people over there, but the possibility that culture, privilege and racial assumptions might also have shaped us?
Can we stay in that conversation?
Or do we reach quickly for evidence that reassures us?
But I am a good person.
But I have Black friends.
But I loved you.
But I never treated you differently.
But that isn’t what I meant.
Perhaps that is where the deeper work of reflection, dialogue and growth begins.
Not with proving that we are racist or proving that we are not.
But with becoming curious about why certain questions feel so threatening.
What am I protecting?
What might I have to reconsider?
What might I discover about the culture that shaped me?
What have I learned to regard as normal simply because it has always been normal for me?
And what happens to my understanding of myself if someone I care about experiences that same world differently?
For years, I thought perhaps the saddest part was that we could not agree.
I remember reaching a point where it seemed we could no longer find common ground. I was left unsure about what, precisely, had become irreconcilable.
I am beginning to think the sadder part is that disagreement became something our friendship could not survive.
We once imagined growing old as friends.
That is perhaps why the ending still feels difficult to understand.
My dear White friend, I do not write this because I have decided what was happening inside you.
I cannot know that.
I write because our friendship has left me with questions.
And perhaps questions are sometimes more useful than accusations.
Maybe the real measure of our commitment to anti-racism is not how confidently we can explain White privilege.
Perhaps it is whether we can remain present when someone invites us to examine how privilege, culture and bias might live within us.
Whether we can sit with the discomfort.
Whether we can resist defending ourselves long enough to become curious.
Whether our understanding of ourselves can survive the scrutiny.
And perhaps whether our relationships can create enough psychological safety to hold difficult conversations without requiring either person to silence what matters to them.
With affection,
Shungu
