Should You Dump a Friend When You Disagree?
As with all things, it depends.
I just got off the phone with someone I consider a friend.
No, a real friend. The kind of real friend that gets in your shit when you are full of it, and need to hear it. And will get in your shit because she knows you can be, and want to be, better. The kind of friend who will, when you are down, operate the crane to get your ass back on your feet, because she knows you will get filth all over you to do the same for her.
That kind of friend.
She and I met just about the time this whole George Floyd tsunami was about to begin. It would be an understatement to say that our friendship was forged on the crucible of those events.
She’s Black. I’m White. Kindly, there was no time to discuss fashion.
We were (are/have been for a long time now)in the middle of fascism, if you will. Or at least some home-grown variety of same, before some wag decides to call me out on the application of the word. Get over yourself.
Of such things, you figure out fast whether or not the person whom you so blithely refer to as “friend” does, indeed, deserve the label.
Speaking with Rosennab is sometimes deeply uncomfortable. That, kindly, is precisely why we are friends. For to be friends with immensely bright, courageous, in-your-face, own-your-shit people is to be invited to grow. No, forced to grow.
Don’t wanna grow? Then find folks to hang out with. But do NOT call them friends.
Got my drift?
Okay. Let’s play.
First,
Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between people. Wikipedia.
Okay. Fine. However, for those of us past fifty (Rosenna is 57, I’m 67), and for those of us who engage in connections that transcend race, gender, culture, religion and the like, the word carries a very different weight, most especially right now. It also implies a very different quality and demand for how we show up for one another, most especially when our friends are forced to chew on shit sandwiches. As in, carrying the tribal weight of multiple centuries that they all suffer for being Black, and paying for it publicly when another bleeding Black body lies in the streets.
To that, this piece by Jeanette C. Espinoza:
Here’s the other definition which, I believe, is part of what gets us in trouble:
To friend, as a verb:
add (someone) to a list of contacts associated with a social networking website.
As someone old enough to have preceded this habit, my understanding and use of the word friend has a whole other meaning. I am not in the market for a mass of folks who “friend” me, some amorphous group of People I Don’t Know, who, in their numbers, afford me a (false) sense of importance.
To wit, the nitwit on Linked In who gauged his entire being on the statement that he had accumulated fifty thousand contacts on Linked In. Oh for crying out loud. I could comment but I won’t. I want to. Badly. But I won’t.
Here’s where I’m going with this.
The George Floyd et.al.( that we have to add et. al which is Latin shorthand for “and the others” is part of the tragedy) deaths and destruction have forced many of us to reassess those whom we believed were our friends.
To that this difficult but important piece by Brianna Holt:
I commented on it at length but here’s the piece that came up for me during my Zoom call with my buddy Rosenna.
We were talking about this article, and the deeply difficult business of what friendship means. She pointed out with the kind of absolute clarity for which I love her so much that without well-defined words, such as what we mean by “friend,” we aren’t going to have well-defined experiences.
Let’s please explore this in the context of the last few years.
The election of the worst human being in history to the American Presidency cost quite a few of us our contacts. Like the Civil War, it tore apart families. It cost me a four-decade-long close friendship. Not some hangout buddy of just the last few years. For some of us that’s all we have in part because we haven’t been alive long enough to have four-decade-long friendships.
Those are hard to come by. They are horrible to lose. But lose them we sometimes must when the trajectories of our lives diverge.
Which, frankly, was why that election was deeply wounding, for it tore holes in the fabric of those friendships that in many cases had otherwise stood the test of time. This time, personal choices to back someone for the highest office exposed areas of such fundamental and irreparable disagreement so that those connections were ripped asunder forever.
Then there was #MeToo, which unearthed many hateful women who decided to side with our abusers when those of us who chose to tell our stories of sexual assault went public. That caused me, and a great many more of us, to again have to reassess our alliances, and those who superficially spoke to or supported, at least at some level, the business of how viciously the patriarchy affects all of us. ALL of us.
More recently, with Covid-19 forming the umbrella under which all these issues fomented and boiled, the never-ending issues of race were brought to the fore. Now we have murders, not just of Black men (as usual, kindly) but of Black women (also sadly again), which of course also touches the #MeToo issue, all exacerbated by the brutally inept and in my opinion, intent-on-genocide current Administration. All underscored and further revealed by Covid-19.
We can hardly tease any of these things out as separate; they are sticky filaments of the same web on which we rest. Or struggle, or die, as the case may be.
One otherwise very, very bright female friend and I reconnected recently. We were fellow Army officers, and remained friends for more than forty years. She began by saying she was at Rushmore for the July 4th rally.
Well, shit.
Then she said something that left me gobsmacked:
“I can’t believe anything about Covid. I don’t know anyone who has it. Do you?”
I heard the fabric of my heart tear.
YES OF COURSE I DO. Unfortunately I know people who died of it. People close to me who’ve had it. People close to me who are in danger from it. One is our very own Ann Litts, whose family had just gotten it, and who had been exposed. A nurse. Who gets regular reports on her case files of deaths from Covid. Oh, I’m sure she just made that all up. Especially about her grandkids. Of course she did.
I knew my veteran buddy well enough to know that nothing I said would make a dent.
At the end of our conversation my veteran buddy said that she’d like to be in closer touch.
I don’t.
I long admired this woman, have written about her in my articles, and in so many ways had the utmost respect. She battled gender discrimination and had risen to unbelievable levels in the military contracting world. I cannot know how much that has affected her thinking. Not for me to say.
Another one bites the dust. I strongly suspect that if she read my Medium articles, we may not have even spoken this last time. While I am sad, especially as there are fewer and fewer people who knew me “way back when,” I cannot countenance continuing my journey with people whose value set is so utterly out of sync with my own that it pains me to have a conversation.
To be fair, people do not have to agree with me or with my beliefs for me to love them. What pains me are those who have lost their compassion- and the rigidity with which they see and judge the world does not track with where I am, and hope to be headed.
I said nothing. As with a previous 40-year friendship, I am going to have to let that one fade quietly into the distance if for no other reason than I much prefer to remember these two extraordinary women as they were, not from some horrific argument. While you may call me a coward, to me this is grace. For nothing I say will change them any more than, as Brianna writes, those fair weather friends are going to stay the course with the deep and difficult challenges that being friends with Black folks demands of us today.
In this pre-George Floyd piece about friendships and toxicity, writer Marina Khidekel presents eleven different situations which might cause you and me to rethink our peeps:
Yeah, okay. My guess is that most of the respondents were White, and of course this piece precedes what my article discusses. Still, there are two salient points that do indeed speak to the heart-rending business of ending our deeper connections:
When their moral compass doesn’t align with ours (or it becomes clear that they don’t have one at all) and their friendship hinders our growth.
That last gets to the heart of my point.
My dearest, most treasured friends, even the newest ones, are very clear how committed I am to owning my shit. That beacon is brighter than the Phare du Créac’h lighthouse. I am seriously committed. You don’t have to be as much as I am, but two things: you don’t want to hang with me if you’re an excuse person, and if your moral compass around the Big Issues of the Day wobbles in direct proportion to those you’re trying to impress. Or worse, if your idea of being down with it consists of putting a black square on a Facebook page, which is about effective as a gnat fart in a hurricane.
You’re not going to be happy with my friendship.
If you are that committed, not only have I got your back, but I will do all I can to support your journey. I will call you on your shit, drag you out of the swamps, raise you up when you need it, and damn sure push you to the head of the line if I see where someone might want to hire you. Your successes uplift me.
Friendships are forged in conflict. Tested by time. We watch what those around us consistently do, not what they say they will do. I dumped a twenty-year friendship with a woman who had a lot to say about spirituality but thought nothing of eviscerating me in ways that she was uniquely qualified to do. I shared all my fears with her. She knew how to slice into my soft underbelly. My successes threatened her.
I will no longer debase myself for the approval of others.
Ousted. I don’t miss her at all. Nor do I miss the other two, for their life arcs have disappeared over other horizons.
By removing the deep roots of those three fundamental connections, all of them White women, oh the unbelievable people who later took their places, I made room.
Rosenna pointed out with her typical wisdom that when we Velcro LOTS of our hangout folks to us and call them “friends,” then everything feels like loss. To that she said,
“It could be clarity you’re gaining.”
You see why I love her.
Clarity is power. The power to uproot the shallow weeds of people who do not understand, don’t wish to understand, and most emphatically do not choose to walk the hot coals of hard work with you when doing so could cause public censure or some other kind of harm.
If the only way you get to keep your friends, such as they are, is by continuing to align with oppressors and the culture that encourages and perpetuates that oppression, then please don’t be surprised if your Token Black Friend takes a permanent hike.
Because kindly, what’s happening right now, from Covid-19 to #MeToo to #BLM to all these huge social issues that we must face, must embrace, they aren’t events that will just go away soon.
No. This is our normal, this upheaval, this demand and invitation for us to step up, be courageous, be willing to challenge and then own our shit. To rewrite what we stand for and with whom we choose to stand.
That may cost you. It already has cost me.
For my part, and I cannot speak for anyone else here, I learned a long time ago that if I wanted good things in my life, they might exact a price. That could be time or money or emotional investment, sweat equity. But they require something of me. That’s not a loss. That’s a net gain. For in the longest run, those who have the courage to stay the course with you, laugh at your shit, encourage you when you trip, embrace you when you win, hold your hand when you fail, and never rail at you for your ignorance (and I have plenty of that) are few and far between.
They are worth fighting for.
They will fight for you.
And I will fight for mine.
That’s a friend.
