Can We Still Be Friends?

Can we see and accept the past?

If you live long enough, if you write long enough, you’re bound to piss someone off. If you’re a conflict-avoiding peacemaker like me, you have likely taken great pains in your life to keep from pissing people off intentionally.

I keep thinking of the Seinfeld legend, George Costanza, and his assertion that “Yes, everyone must like me.”

George has many faults, self-absorption seeming to be an umbrella for all of them.

But that’s television, and self-absorption in the real world has consequences that those with the affliction can rarely see. Maybe to be self-absorbed is a product of improperly focused nurturing, and so we should not unfairly criticize or condemn those who suffer this condition.

What, though, of those who blindly adhere to a past constructed for them by people who believe that some folk are inherently, genetically, superior to other folk?

“The Past” is a fascinating thing. Many who want us to move past certain pasts also want us to retain artifacts and objects that honor and help us remember history, other more specific pasts.

I was speaking with a friend a couple of years back when the movement to take down Confederate monuments in public spheres first gained traction. He was afraid that doing so would serve to wipe out history and cause us to forget certain parts of our past.

“Wouldn’t our efforts to preserve the past,” I countered, “be better served in saving actual places that meant something to us — places where we spent years of our lives, like our old elementary school?”

That building had stood since the early 1900s but in the last two decades had fallen into ruin and was used only by those seeking a clandestine rendezvous of a more sordid sort. It was finally, completely, razed last year. Gone, and for too many, forgotten.

“You make a good point,” my friend said. “I’ll have to think about that.”

I’m sure he did think about it, though we never revisited that conversation, so I don’t know the end of his thinking.

I both do and don’t want to know his conclusions. I value our friendship; it’s old and abiding. And while I know we disagree on some points, I also know that despite our similar origins and grounding place, we have had wildly different experiences.

I give him the benefit of any doubt because our friendship is many decades old and because I know he will listen and think and trusts me, as I do him.

Yet, I can’t say the same for every old friend.

How many old friendships do I have today where the sole basis, the main basis, is whiteness?

This, then, is my reconsideration line — a line that I’m just forming and is nowhere set in stone, or even clay, at this moment.

In his recent memoir, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation, author and Arkansas native J. Chester Johnson notes about racial reconciliation and change that for too many whites,

“A steadfast commitment to no change; that had to be the code of honor. The white Southerner would have to fulfill his or her commitment to tradition and history by being dug in. No adjustment at all without a fight to the end. Grudgingly. At the same time, white southerners began to challenge themselves with these thoughts and questions: How in the world did we allow this Civil Rights Movement to happen in the first place? It was solidarity that helped protect our way of life for so long. How did we betray the cause? Was it our loss of commitment that let the inherited system slip away? We just didn’t pay attention as our forebears had for generations to keep the blacks under our thumb, under our control” (117).

That’s a powerful indictment, and I can attest to its truth from my own personal experience of listening to racist elders and racist peers decry “welfare cheats,” “crackhead thugs,” and probably the heart of the “crime”: those “black animals” who want to sleep with white women. Our women.

Once, a student at the college where I’ve taught for 33 years said to me when I asked why he was so resistant to racial change,

“They keep asking for more, and soon they’ll take over.”

They.

“So if ‘they’ did take over, would you fear that ‘they’ would do to ‘us’ what we’ve done to ‘them’?”

“No, you’re misunderstanding what I mean.”

Yet, he never explained further. He was in a fraternity that revered Robert E. Lee.

So, at the risk of stereotyping, I believe I know what he meant.

Johnson’s words above strike a deep chord today as we are in the midst of protests against police violence — a violence that clearly holds a racist character/component. What are people thinking about this blue violence, these protests? To how many do Johnson’s conjectured words ring true?

To how many of my friends, new and old, do these words resonate with their beliefs and experiences?

We each have to figure out our path during these times. For too much of my life I avoided facing the truth of myself, my struggle with racism. Today, I don’t mind and actually relish facing the struggle for justice and equality with those who also seek justice and equality and a reconciliation with our racist past. Like my old friend mentioned above.

But I think it’s time to let go of, to say goodbye to other old friends.

Those who use the word “thug” to mean one and only one thing.

Those who cringe at the thought of “race-mixing.”

Those who use black dialect in a demeaning way — as if there’s any other way.

Those who still want to honor dead Confederates in public places, or anywhere for that matter.

Keep them in the history books, where they belong. As Johnson also states, those who oppose memorials to black victims of lynchings, as in Elaine/Helena, Arkansas, divert us from reconciliation and healing by suggesting that we “forget the past…and move on” (168).

So, remember this, forget that, but let “us” choose which is which.

That has happened for too long now — the white male control of what counts as legitimate history. What counts. What ranks.

I haven’t publicly or privately told anyone yet that I can no longer be friends with them. Is that conflict/declaration coming? Likely so.

I have blocked and unfollowed some people I’ve known forever on Facebook, as I am sure some have done with me. Perhaps what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

But how much do we keep around that has already hurt us in deep, abiding ways?

I plan on studying further into my past and my future. My anti-racist future.

What I do know, and this might seem only a minor declaration right now, is that I cannot remain friends with anyone who supports Trump, the Great Divider/Denier of our lives. Ironically, his attempts to divide are working on me, though I’m not sure in the way he intended.

Nothing is forever, and so there are always chances to heal and reconnect. We all make mistakes, too, but not all of us are willing to learn from our errors of judgment.

There simply are not very good people on both sides.

So goodbye to all that, as Joan Didion once wrote.

I’ll remember you, and while I could be wrong, I don’t think I’ll miss you.