Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendships

Bernard gathers the reflections of authors, journalists, editors, activists and professors in a collection of essays that represents""an unwavering commitment to representing the painful, beautiful realities of friendships complicated by race and history."" The strongest pieces elegantly and honestly use intensely personal stories to articulate larger political and social realities, and they celebrate unlikely alliances with an eye towards their sometimes tenuous nature. In""Nearer, My God to Thee,"" John Gennari examines his seemingly innocuous hero worship of an African American student at Harvard in the context of deep-seated, virtually subliminal beliefs about race.""When I admire William's Olympian self-possession ... is it a case of my admiring William for challenging assumptions about how a black man should sound and act?"" Gennari asks.""Conversely, when I resent or am made uncomfortable by his seeming lack of humility ... is this a case of my tapping into the white man's age-old anxiety about 'uppity' Negroes?"" Novelist Trey Ellis's""Repellant Afro"" explores the author's relationship with Jewish children from his neighborhood in the '70s. Race, says Ellis, wasn't really discussed among the friends:""For us, somehow, talking about our differences felt tacky."" But Ellis did experience his blackness intensely and clandestinely, as both a source of pride and fear.""My blackness was my pornography,"" he writes. The authors don't shy away from hard truths; nor do they offer up easy answers. But that's as it should be: the value here lies in their willingness to explore their own assumptions and examine how friendships break through some boundaries to confront new ones.