people basically want to do one of three things on Craigslist: buy a sofa, find a place to live, or get a blow job in the next fifteen minutes. You can do other things, I guess, like find a tennis partner or someone to read your aura. But are you sure “aura reader” doesn’t really mean “guy who’s willing to give you a blow job in the next fifteen minutes”? It probably doesn’t seem like the right place to make a new friend, only a new “friend.” Friendships are supposed to happen naturally. But ask yourself: Do they? The last time I made a black friend was eight years ago.
I listed my ad in the “activities” section of the Web site. I avoided the “casual encounters” section. I had the ad vetted to make sure I wasn’t using some unintended shorthand that means I’m looking for someone to beat me up while I vacuum his living room. I labeled my post “Looking for African-American Friend.” I thought about saying “black.” There’s a difference between the terms black and African-American, and, constitutionally, I’m in the “black” camp. White people who say “African-American” are the same people who keep bottles of Purell hand sanitizer in their knapsacks. But I still wrote “African-American.” It’s a delicate thing, taking out an advertisement for a black friend.
My Craigslist post said, among other things, “I’m a 36-year-old white guy. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and have always gone to diverse schools. I’ve always had a decent number of black friends. That’s changed over time. I work in the publishing industry, which is super white, and I’ve realized that my group of friends is getting whiter and whiter.… It’s amazing to me that almost everyone I know has either black friends or white friends, but not both. We could have a black president, and still not have a very mixed country.” Then I added a few more lines about don’t let me show up at the bar and you’ve got a horse tranquilizer for my drink. I guess you could say the post ran a little long. I guess you could say I was worried about the possibility of a misunderstanding.
Why one would take out an ad on the Internet looking for a black friend is a legitimate question. Here’s my answer:
I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I’ve always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it’ll change; it’s probably my wife’s fault. But it’s time to acknowledge that I’ve become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I wear white tennis sneakers from the ’70s. I listen to ambient music. I have dinner parties where I serve Spanish rosé and this softer version of mozzarella that has a lovely, almost liquid center that you can only get at the Italian import store. I do yoga, and I get excited when it’s ramp season. Sometimes I’d really like to punch myself in the face. (You might argue that I’m not describing “whiteness” but “arugula-ness”; but when black people have this lifestyle, they get accused of being white.) I used to make jokes about “look at us here at the weekend house in the Catskills in our blazers and sneakers eating the braised pork shoulder from the Jamie Oliver cookbook with the David Gray on in the background—aren’t we like that Amstel Light commercial?” You know that Amstel Light commercial about the white people’s country weekend—it’s white-people pornography. But I stopped making the joke, because it stopped being a joke. Because I stopped noticing it.
About the cocktail party I mentioned: I invited my friends Twan and Rem, both black. Rem couldn’t come, so there was just Twan. I mean, the math here is pretty stark: If something happened to Twan or Rem—if one of them moved, or one of them stopped liking me—the number of black friends I have would drop by 50 percent. It would be like when Colin Powell resigned from the Bush administration and there was just…Condoleezza Rice. There’s a bright line there. The Condoleezza line. Admitting that you count your black friends is a violation of the Unracist White Person Magna Carta, but really, I couldn’t handle walking around knowing that I have the same number of black friends as George W. Bush.
the next day, no one answered the ad. The day after that, no one answered it. On the third day, someone wrote back, “What are you some idiot LOL.” I tried making it less boring, less qualified. I tried using the syntax from house-swap ads: “Will Trade My Whiteness for Your Blackness.” Days of silence. I had to admit that I wasn’t surprised. Would you answer an ad like that? Would you go out and meet the person who posted that ad without a Taser?
I didn’t really want to put GQ in the post. I figured the spirit of the project should be enough motivation. The nobility of it. People should read the ad and think, Damn, he’s right; let’s reengineer society one man at a time. I’ll also concede that I hoped this might yield an actual friend and not someone who only thought it’d be cool to be in a magazine. But no one was answering, so GQ went into the post.
The next day, Amber C—— wrote me to say, “so u wanna get some black friends well I’m black.“ Amber, what’s the attitude about? I like it. I sent off an e-mail. I never heard from Amber C—— again.
A guy named Ajay e-mailed: “hey yr project sounds like fun. If u are doing any project on southasian -indian guys and need help let me know -I would be interested.”
Meg sent this: “I am dark skined and I am married to a white person, we are both musicians and live very happy with each other.” The word shiva was part of her e-mail address. It sounded like a scenario where I end up playing the didgeridoo with a white guy in dreads wearing pants woven out of mustard greens, which seemed a little off point.
I got the impression that these were people at the margins. People outside the operating social networks. There are psychologists who study the anatomy of the social network. Human connection, as the phrase six degrees of separation would suggest, should be spread evenly over all of us like a layer of peanut butter on toast. Only what it really looks like is a ball of yarn: Everyone within a social network, real or virtual, is more or less connected to one another. Your friends tend to be friends with your friends, or they will be soon. And most networks are not connected to each other. Your ball of yarn is your ball of yarn, it is discrete, and once you are inside it, it’s hard to get out. This is what some research psychologists offer up as explanation for why black people and white people don’t know each other. It may also be why it feels so hard to escape my little sliver of the Manhattan publishing industry.
In time, I got some more promising responses. I received an e-mail from a guy named Mike A——. Gingerly, the way you teach an injured bird to eat from your hand, we were able to convince each other that if we met, neither of us was going to try to kill the other one and make a dress out of his skin. He was from Nigeria and worked as a doorman in Tribeca. He said he liked the spirit of what I was trying to do. “America is in the process of re-inventing itself again and that’s what makes America the greatest nation on Earth,” he wrote. I assumed he was talking about Barack Obama.
He got off work at midnight, and I told him I’d meet him at Puffy’s Tavern in Tribeca. I got to the bar early and ordered a Corona. Mike walked in wearing a striped golf shirt and jeans with a knapsack. I waved at him to identify myself. We smiled at each other and shook hands, and then we sat at the bar, facing the Red Bull display.
“I knew it wouldn’t be hard to know it was me,” he said. “I’d be the only black person in the bar!”
“So what part of Nigeria are you from?” I said.
He named a city I’d never heard of. His head was big and almost boxlike, and he had a kind smile, but there was something hardened about him. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he’d moved over here by himself and had been through long periods of solitude. A lot of the people who responded to the Craigslist post seemed to be outside any ball of yarn—independent actors like Mike A——, pinging through the social universe. But in a place the size of New York City, the size of the world, the margins are teeming, finely grained beaches of souls that can be heartbreaking to ponder.
“So you’re from Woodside,” I said. Woodside, I thought, is the neighborhood you drive through to get to LaGuardia.
“Woodhaven,” he said. Maybe that was the neighborhood you drive through to get to LaGuardia. Or was it JFK? He lived there with a roommate whom he didn’t know well. He’d been in a relationship for two years, but they’d recently broken up and she went to Houston. There are all kinds of Nigerians in Houston. She’d kept him on lockdown, he said, so he really didn’t have friends to hang out with in the city.
“So I always thought doormen knew everything,” I said. “Who’s having an affair, who’s been shut in their apartment for six weeks, who’s ordering cocaine delivery at 3 a.m.”
Mike laughed. “I don’t know anything about that! It mostly seems like people are just so busy.”
We struggled on. I tried to sound casual, but the rhythm was off. Because of the mixture of anxiety and boredom you feel when talking to someone you don’t know very well for more than five minutes. He’d said in his e-mail, “I love to traveling, hangout, like bars, lounges, flirting with the girls, movies too…but only if its with a girl date, I think two guys watching a movie on a wknd is corny…unless they are couples lol.” But I couldn’t think of anything to ask him about traveling or lounges or couples lol. What did we have in common, really, besides 99.5 percent of our DNA?
“What does your wife think of you meeting me?” Mike said. “Like this.”
“Um. What do you mean?”
Mike looked at me like, What do you mean, what do I mean?
In his e-mail, Mike had assured me: “I’m absolutely 100 percent straight and just looking for hangout buddies.” Maybe when he asked what my wife thought of us being here, he was asking whether we had told each other that we were straight in some elaborate Kabuki-like form of mutual self-deception that now meant we could blow each other in the bathroom at Puffy’s without actually being gay. It was also possible that he was just saying like, you know how women are, keeping you on lockdown.
I took the opportunity to mention my wife seven times in the next ten minutes.
Even when we changed the subject, the weirdness of being together hung in the air around us. The fact is, we were two men who’d met on Craigslist meeting for a drink at 1 a.m., which no matter what we talked about, was a fraught situation.
Maybe it wasn’t about what color Mike was. Maybe the reason I hadn’t made any black friends lately was partly because it’s hard for men to make new friends, period, as life proceeds and one is no longer 23 years old and no longer has roommates named Jay and Sean and Josh. All new friends come prepackaged. All new friends are couple friends. MattAndChloe, Seth-AndSusan, ElizabethAndMichael. I can’t say exactly why. I have a theory that men get more bearlike as they age, increasingly taciturn, hairy, prone to long spells of slumber, prone to growly solitary rummaging. The man can get unsocialized as he ages. And the married man can come to believe there’s a division of labor: The woman forms the social connections, and the man is treated in social situations as if he were just learning to feed himself solid food again after a terrible accident. That’s why the older the man gets, the more isolated he becomes, the more rarefied his world is, the more other humans seem to be accelerating away from him, the more his friendships become dominated by figures so long known that they’re more like comfortable marriages than friendships.
i’ve always been a little too aware of the race of my friends. One of the most embarrassing memories I have is when I was 8 years old and I made my uncle guess whether my best friend was black or white, and he just started laughing at me. “He’s black!” I said, already feeling like there was something wrong with my question. I didn’t know one of the basic unspoken rules in America, which my question (and this essay) is a violation of: It’s okay to be proud of having black friends.
This best friend’s name was Bobby Poindexter. He was tiny but adult-seeming even in the second grade. He wore a white vest to school sometimes. He was a little Marvin Gaye motherfucker. If you could smoke menthols in the second grade, that’s what Bobby Poindexter would have done. He used to take me to his church, which was way different from any church I’d ever been to. He had an Aunt Bootie who was 400 years old, ate Horehound candy, and carried a purse filled with Bibles and what must have been twenty pounds of concrete. He introduced me to the idea that you could have “cousins” who weren’t your cousins, and he called me “cuz,” which was in retrospect a precursor to “nigga,” which I bet he wouldn’t have called me. I identified with Bobby Poindexter because he was bused into my elementary school and he existed outside the social strata of my world. I felt absolutely no social anxiety when I hung out with him, which made him one of a kind, if you didn’t count my mom, who I couldn’t bring to school with me.
Later, in high school, Bobby Poindexter was killed in a car accident. He was drunk and crashed into someone’s living room. We all turned out for the funeral, the whole high school. I wrote an elegy of our friendship in the school newspaper about how we used to be best friends but when we got to the more racially diverse high school he sort of fell in with the black people, I fell in with whiter folks, and we stopped hanging out. It was the story of amicable racial estrangement, which is the story of every phase of my life. Like, the trend line in high school was toward segregation, despite us being forced together for meetings hosted by the Student Group on Race Relations, and the colloquia held in the small auditorium by professional public speakers who used to be in the Crips. College was more segregated but somehow odder, because there was no everyday racial tension. Black was black and white was white, and there was no artificial, socially engineered program to change that. (Though I did insist on joining a fraternity with at least one black person. Exactly one black person, actually. Kari.) And as an adult? I wouldn’t even use the word segregated anymore. Unless you could say that the French are segregated from the British.
Amicable racial estrangement is also the story of America at large, circa right now. Demographically, studies show that the country has been quietly resegregating—and this time, self-segregating. It’s the era of racism without the actual racists—8 percent of white people say they would be “uncomfortable” voting for a black man to be president; it’s the other 92 percent who say they’d vote for a black person, but as often as not aren’t actually friends with one, that I’m talking about. Contemporary life can be arranged as a series of homogeneous zones that white folks can glide between—Westchester and Block Island and surfing retreats in Mexico—with only the most glancing, waiterly contact with all but the least foreign-seeming black people, or really with anyone different from you at all. What’s changed is, in the ’70s and ’80s, there was a kind of post-’60s social optimism about how we were going to sit down in a big circle and talk it out and become one great human family and be free to be you and me. That’s when I grew up, and I’ve been waiting for the big coming-together ever since. But something happened. I’m not sure exactly what. Maybe people resented the social engineering. Maybe it just felt too hard and everyone was relieved when they didn’t have to try anymore. But we don’t seem to have the stomach for that kind of change as a culture anymore, personally or politically—if that had been part of Obama’s message, he wouldn’t have made it out of Iowa.
Would anyone today make a television show about the funny culture clash that happens when a wealthy black dry-cleaning-business owner moves into a white high-rise building? Or about the funny culture clash that happens when a white guy adopts two black kids, one of them being Gary Coleman? We seem all fired up about talking about other great divides. “Immigration” (i.e., there are too many Mexican people) is a hot-button issue. So is Red and Blue America. But relations between the races doesn’t seem to be what you would call relevant anymore, despite what we’re told about the significance of the Obama candidacy. Two national conventions in the midst of a so-called racially historic election and not a single explicit word about race. Mike A—— might be right about how America is reinventing itself again, but it’s reinventing itself as a place that thinks it’s postracial and is completely segregated. Does fish fry in the kitchen? Do beans burn on the grill? No one seems to give a shit anymore.
the responses on Craigslist slowed to a trickle. I tried doing up a flyer. It said looking for an african-american friend at the top. There was a description of what the idea was, and at the bottom were little flaps you could tear off printed with an e-mail address—gqdiversificationproject@gmail.com. I put my face on it with a little word balloon that said, “Hello! I’m Devin.” I looked like an ass, but apparently that was part of the program. I guess I still wasn’t sure whether this whole thing was a joke or not. I’d told a few people about what I was doing. They mostly laughed. So it’s satire, they said. Not exactly, I said. I put the flyers up in Harlem and in Bed-Stuy, which I didn’t even know how to get to without a map. I made Twan come with me in case someone took it the wrong way (Don’t punch me! Some of my best friends…!).
The only guy who responded was Mario G., a 43-year-old DJ from Harlem who loves roller-skate discos. We met for an iced coffee near my office in Midtown. He wore a white straw hat and a white mesh shirt. He said he’d had a blessed life and that he smiles every chance he gets. He kept balloons in his pocket for kids. I liked Mario a lot, but I don’t think he was here to meet me because he wanted to start hanging out and playing fantasy football together.
Mario, like a lot of the people I met, seemed to see me as something more than Devin the individual. It was like I was a collection point for things people wanted to say to white people but never had a chance to. Mario wanted to tell me a story, which I think was his commentary about race in America, about a guy he’d met in the Marines.
“I loved him like a brother,” he said. “He was an addict. The last time I saw him, I could tell he would die soon. And that because I wasn’t in his world, you know, because I was his only black friend and he was my only white friend, that I would probably never find out that he died. And sure enough, I lost touch. I tried to call him this year, but his number had been changed. I just would have liked to have gone to his funeral, or at least found out that he died. It never sat right with me.”
Then he offered to make me a balloon animal.
“Why did you respond to my flyer?” I asked, before he left.
“You said on it, ‘Ask yourself, how many white friends do you have?’ And I had to admit, I didn’t have any.” Then he said, “I’m glad I did it.”
when i pitched this story in a GQ meeting, everyone at the conference table laughed. “That’s funny. Will you be my new black friend?”
“No, really,” I said.
Everyone got quiet. Like: Um, I’m not really qualified to say if that’s an awful idea. That’s been pretty much the reaction of all white people who hear about it. They stop talking. My feeling is: Fuck them. Unless you’re willing to say what the situation is, then you’re part of the problem.
Even if my intentions were noble, though, I have to admit that there was something about putting up an advertisement on Craigslist that didn’t feel quite right. One afternoon I found this Web site called Rent-A-Negro.com. It’s satirical. You can log on and fill out a form to rent a black person—part of the joke is that black people get used all the time, anyway, so they might as well get paid for it. On the home page it said: “What can you give a person who has everything? Give them a new black friend!” Sitting in my office, clicking through this Web site, my blood went cold. It was like it had been invented to make fun of me, personally. One of the weirder aspects of racism is that no one is ever sure whether he’s racist or not, except for those few people who are totally okay with being racist. The rest of us, having internalized the knotty racial logic of this country, the contradictions about how you need to be color-blind and not color-blind, keep a wary eye on ourselves to see whether or not what we just said or did or thought was racist. And this project started to feel like the worst kind of tokenism—e-mail me here! I don’t care who you are as long as you’re black! I remembered what a friend of mine said about the ad I’d taken out: Why don’t you just get a lawn jockey and carry it around with you to parties?
So I took a new tack. I’d ask Twan and Rem to introduce me to their friends. Twan and Rem, like almost every black person I’ve ever been friends with, each live in two different balls of yarn: They have a blacker world and a whiter world. I called them up. It’d be funny, I told Rem. But also serious. “I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rem said. “You should.”
Rem introduced me to Bjorn, one of seven black Bjorns in the known world (I made that up). Bjorn and I met at a German beer place and he told me what a real estate banker does; he told me about his wife, Emily, and I tried to figure out whether or not she was white, because I felt like you can’t just ask. Rem introduced me to Pete, who brought me to an informal drinks session for people of color in finance, mostly traders, and mostly like other traders I’ve known—they love Vegas, they love steak houses, they seemed to know a thing or two about whey protein. They all bro-hugged each other, but when Pete introduced me they shook my hand like I was going to interview them for a student loan.
It seemed like every other day I had a lunch or a dinner or a trip to Brooklyn planned. I’d be standing on the corner of 47th and Madison or 23rd and Seventh or some other appointed meeting spot, looking expectantly at every vaguely brown person who walked past me: Are you my black friend? It was like a second job. It was like being one of those people who decide that they’re done with being single and they’re going to do something about it and proceed like a headhunter looking for an account executive.
in time it became clear that there was one other refinement I needed to make to The Project if I was going to make an actual friend. I kept meeting people for a drink, just the two of us, at a bar where it was quiet enough to talk. That isn’t how you make a friend. That’s a blind date. And blind dates are almost exactly like job interviews, where the small talk feels so incredibly small and heavy at the same time, where every word is so fully triangulated, Well, I like some of the Wu-Tang Clan’s music, but some of it seems kind of unformed, but they’re still total geniuses, that you end up sounding like John Kerry circa 2004, and you’re just relieved when it’s over. The key was to go to an organically occurring event, meet like-minded people, see if we have anything to talk about. I had to presume, since we’ve established that the social life of black America was pretty opaque to me these past eighteen years, that black people have parties, right? So theoretically I could go to one of these parties. I’d probably be kind of a celebrity, a token-y conversation piece—hey, let’s go talk to the white guy!—and next thing you know, I’d have a new black friend.
I’d recently had a drink with Baraka, one of Rem’s friends. And he’d mentioned something about a party up in Harlem. His friend Ralph was throwing it. I saw my opening. What about like, would it be cool if I came? My wife and I took the train up for it. I got all up in her business about what she was going to wear. “Don’t dress like a tomboy,” I said. “I feel like black women don’t dress like tomboys.” She said, “I don’t know if you realized, but I am white. Even when I’m wearing the right shoes.” She gave me shit the whole way up there after that. On 125th Street, I accepted a Jesus flyer from a guy on the corner and said, Thanks! “If that guy were white, you’d never have taken that,” she said. “That’s fucked-up.”
When I showed up, Ralph said, “Come in here and let me indoctrinate you.” He poured me some Hennessy and gave me some fish he’d made. Ralph is 74 and from Trinidad. To meet him is to be charmed by him. And his mischievous face. He’s the kind of guy who could tell you a story about how he was having a three-way with two 17-year-old girls when his wife walked in on him and you’d say, What a rascal. (His wife was actually upstairs, behind the drawn curtain in one of the windows—Ralph’s been taking care of her since she had a stroke.)
I’d have to say, though, that I was not a celebrity. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Baraka was late. There were five women sitting around a baby, but there was a male-proof force field around them. I tried to make conversation with a giant guy with dreads who was cooking a deer leg on the grill.
“Do you think you can taste the mesquite?” I said.
“People say you can,” he said.
“Mesquite’s a hardwood,” I said.
What was I talking about? What the fuck do I know about mesquite? It’s hard enough to be at a party where you don’t know anyone. But when you are the only white guy, you feel like you can’t even be awkward in private. And when you do talk to someone, there’s a social hump between you. It’s like you’re having two different conversations, the actual conversation (“Mesquite’s a hardwood”) and the subtitled one, which goes: “You are black.” “You are white.” “Hello, black person!” “Hello, white person!”
The feeling I had at Ralph’s had been explained by research psychologists. Studies have been conducted in which a black person and a white person who didn’t know each other were placed in a room together. The white person would usually start exhibiting all kinds of nonverbal cues about his state of anxiety: blink more, breathe heavier, arrange his chair farther away—the kinds of things I was probably doing to the man with the dreads working the grill. When they are interviewed, the white subjects say the anxiety comes from being worried the black person’s going to think they’re racist. That’s why it’s the more racially aware people who seem the most racist. For them the little voice that says “I’M TALKING TO A BLACK PERSON!” is deafening. And for people who aren’t worried? At Ralph’s my wife asked this pretty young woman in jeans and a tank top, “What is soul food, anyway?” It was like the scene in a movie where the guy tries to throw himself in front of the bullet—nooooooooooooooooo! It’s precisely the thing I wouldn’t ever ask, even if I didn’t know (and I swear: I know what soul food is). But you know what happened? The woman answered my wife. And I believe they had a better chance of becoming friends because of it.
Later, when it got dark out, Ralph put on a Trinidadian record everyone knew. And one of Ralph’s sons, he’s a plumber on Staten Island, took out this kidney-shaped plumbing fixture and started wailing on it with metal sticks. Then this other guy, an old friend of Ralph’s with a bald head and a wide mouth full of beautiful teeth, started singing this song about a woman with black eyes. And everyone started singing. I can’t remember being at a party where people sang anything other than “Happy Birthday.” Now I know why I wanted to go to a black party, I thought. Because they’re fun. Because white people really are uptight. We have a lot of good points, too. But Jesus it was nice to be at a party where not a single person asked me what I did for a living. Still, I stood there, watching this fat woman (Don’t sit that bitch near my food, B—— said when she walked in) plowing through a plate of deer meat, tapping her toe, thinking: This seems like some kind of made-up cultural experience, like I’d ordered it in a catalog. Yes, hello, I’d like the Harlem sing-along picnic?
then, one night, I made a friend. I was sitting at this bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with Twan’s friend Brett, who also could have become my friend if he hadn’t torn his ACL and been laid up for weeks and fucked up my deadline. Fort Greene is one of the rare racial mucous membranes in the five boroughs—it’s getting white-ified but isn’t there yet, and so is temporarily integrated. We were at the bar of a restaurant called Night of the Cookers, a modern-soul-food restaurant, the kind of place that has, like, pine nuts in the collard greens.
“This is kind of the last real black spot in Fort Greene,” Brett said.
“It’s good for property values,” I said. “The white people.”
“You know what’s weird?” he said. “No one talks to each other in Fort Greene anymore. Everyone just keeps their head down.”
Brett said hi to a couple of people and then a couple of other people. Then he said hi to a couple more people. He said, If you’re a black male and you went to college, I know you. A handsome man in a whitetank top with ripped biceps came up to us. He and Brett used to work together at the D.A.’s office in Brooklyn with Twan. Now he’s a criminal defense lawyer.
I stood up and we shook. He bro-hugged me, in a more artful, more nuanced way than I do it. My shit hadn’t been updated since the ’90s, really. To be honest, I was just going by what I saw on TV. I told him I worked for a magazine, and he asked me if I knew Rem. They’d gone to college together. What are the chances, I wondered, that this guy knew both of my black friends. This is some kind of sign. He must think I’m friends with tons of black people. We talked for a while about being a criminal defense lawyer, which is what my dad does, and how every idiot who finds out what you do says, How can you do that?
“I hate that,” I said. “People start to have a different attitude if their son or daughter gets arrested.”
“How can I do that?” he said. “How about the Constitution?”
His name was Kenny. I got his business card. We said, Let’s definitely hang out.
kenny is kind of intense. We met for coffee at a Starbucks near the Manhattan courthouse and we talked for several hours, him in his Paul Smith suit and this impeccable knot in his purple silk tie, a knot you could tell he very carefully mastered how to tie. He told me about growing up in Brownsville and Crown Heights. And how he told his son that George Washington wasn’t who the teachers at school said he was: He was a man with slaves. And how this white lady he worked with wanted to know how he could brush his hair so it’s wavy instead of kinky. He told me about the time in Alabama, after he’d watched one of his uncles shoot and kill another of his uncles with a shotgun, and his family had all gone to the hospital with the dead uncle, and Kenny was outside in the twilight, jumping off the loading dock onto the ground, and a white woman and her son walked past and the son pointed at him and said, “Look at the little nigger boy jump.” And he told me about getting cut with a razor blade across his face when he was in high school, which he said he deserved for getting in over his head in a fight. And he told me about his father, who had been an elevator operator in Tribeca for thirty years, who was a defeated man and told him no one would ever let a black man like Kenny accomplish anything, who Kenny said was worse than having no father at all. He told me about finding him dead on the floor of his house last year with what Kenny described as an exploded heart. He would later say to me, “I’m a militant-ass black dude.” But with Kenny, while he puts on a pretty abrasive front—and he’ll say he’s shocked to hear people say they were afraid to talk to him at first—there’s also something irrepressibly seeking in him. Something open. Racially aware, militant-ass, but seeking. He was drawn to me as much as I was drawn to him, for what you could describe as similar but reversed reasons.
A couple of weeks later, we went to a Trace magazine party in the meatpacking district for their “Black Girls Rule” issue and to a party at a gallery not far from where I live in Manhattan. The crowd at the gallery was 93.7 percent black, arty, filmmakers, music producers, black men in fedoras, black men in flannel pin-striped pants and pink shirts and suspenders whose preppy irony was announced with the high-top Nike sneaker. It was too loud to talk. I put my hands in my pockets. I danced a little. Like: Yeah, I feel this. I have better rhythm than most white people do because I went to a kind-of-black
high school. Maybe that’s some racist misperception or something, but I think it’s true. I have a greasy neck when I want to.
I was already feeling a little bit like the spotlight was on me. The token white boy. But I started examining myself as if I were a friend I was seeing again for the first time in twenty years. It gave me the strangest feeling, like I’d come down with a weird neural condition where I can’t recognize myself in pictures. I couldn’t remember ever deciding to be this person. I thought: Who picked out these clothes? Am I really wearing suede boots? Do I actually like gingham? Why am I wearing what might be called girl jeans? Do I like any of this stuff? Who picked out this personality? Not me. I don’t remember making these decisions.
You can try out all kinds of personalities and styles when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager. But when you get older, you become either black or white, you become a honky or a brother or an Oreo or a wigger. Those seem to be the choices. Wigger is a word I don’t use and would never speak aloud, the underpinnings of which I have fundamental beef with. But if I have to use it, then I kind of always wanted to be a wigger. I just never had the balls to do it. It always seemed somehow disrespectful. But it has nothing to do with wanting to be black, per se. I wish people understood that. What music you like is as much a choice for white people as it is for black people. And how it is you want to speak. And what it is you want your pants to say about you. It seems like life comes down to am I going to wear these Nike Air Force 1s or those Bass Weejuns. All other decisions about racial identity cascade from that. When I see white boys in long white T-shirts and baseball caps, black-culture-identified is how I say it, I feel a sense of recognition. Like I could have gone that way. A few different decisions and I’d at least know how to roll a blunt. But that’s fantasy.
we invited kenny and his wife over for dinner. It would be like a final exam. I told my wife we shouldn’t talk about racial stuff. It should be like we were just having a normal dinner with friends. We decided to make the eggplant pasta from the Jamie Oliver cookbook. I put on some music—this loungy Brazilian music. I hate loungy Brazilian music, but everything else I had—Mobb Deep? Cat Power?—felt too racially themey. I brought out plates and wineglasses and then a vase of flowers and the salt and pepper. Our pepper mill is this mock-antique hand-crank one that I hate (did I just say I hate my pepper mill?), but our other one broke. I reflexively thought: I’ll just make fun of it so they know I don’t actually like it.
There’s a psychological term that’s used to explain why white people and black people aren’t friends: homophily. It means that people are likely to be friends with those who are similar to them. (There’s an aphorism about homophily: Birds of a feather flock together. One of the peculiar duties of social scientists is to prove the most obvious things, make them seem complicated, and then reconstitute them as simple. For examples, see the work of Malcolm Gladwell.) I would argue that the modern world is, in many quarters, dominated by increasingly extreme homophily. If you don’t want to, you’ll never have to talk to anyone whose jeans are different from yours. And there’s the trend toward so-called cultural cocooning, where you only have to listen to people who have the same opinion as you, be it on Fox or MSNBC or Lou Dobbs, depending on if your philosophy is galvanized around conservatism or liberalism or angry people with wet piano keys for teeth.
This endeavor, I can now say, is the product of living in a tiny, overdeveloped culture where the signifiers are too specific and the sameness of our lives has made the tolerances almost too slight to measure. Even among white folks, my shit is pretty specific. That monoculture, where I don’t even have to finish my sentences because everyone already knows what I’m going to say, where we have slightly different versions of the same conversations about the same movies and music and schools and neighborhoods and restaurants and types of people—it wasn’t until I was out of it for a few minutes that I realized the oxygen deprivation that kind of scrutiny can bring on. I am sick of worrying about my pepper mill.
The Project is a stunt, yes, but it’s also an entreaty. And it’s not just about generic diversity; it’s not just about, as someone might say before asking you to join his wife on the two-man fuck swing in his basement, being open to new experiences. It’s an argument for American white people, specifically, to be friends with American black people, specifically. It’s a statement that there’s nothing wrong with counting your black friends. It’s that familiar affirmative-action argument: If it were happening naturally, we wouldn’t need something artificial to create change. And I would say that the white man who doesn’t know the black man doesn’t know America.
It’s also an argument that says: Blackness and whiteness still matter. One of the most modern racial problems we suffer from can be boiled down to this: There is an actual debate going on about whether Barack Obama is the first postracial candidate, if we are living in a postracial world. If we were living in a postracial world, white Americans would not have been so perplexed and terrified by the videotape of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who while clearly an idiot in some ways, is certainly not an unfamiliar character in black churches. And his foolish theory that the American government invented AIDS and gave it to black people? That rumor’s been spread through the black community for twenty years. Hardly defensible, but hardly surprising. He’s no weirder a character than Rush Limbaugh; it’s just that he doesn’t normally get picked up on cable news. And the idea that a black man raised by an occasionally broke single white mother in America can be successfully defined as an elitist betrays a failure of our culture-recognition software and is only possible because white people look at black people with a pretty fundamental lack of perception.
But it’s not like we need a 9/11 Commission to figure our way out of this. It turns out making black friends is easy. I put half a mind to it and found ten guys with whom I’d gladly eat dinner once a month and talk about their kids (which is what it means to be friends with someone at age 36). Baraka; Brett; Eddie, a half-Haitian dude who’s in his last year of business school; Kenny, with whom, plus our wives, I’m about to enjoy a conversation and a meal of pasta à la whitey. Sure, it’s scary at first. White people aren’t used to being outnumbered, so if you’re white that’ll take some getting used to. White folks might wonder: Will they be angry at me? (No.) Is it okay if I ask to touch their hair. (No.) What should I do when it comes time to shake hands? (This is a serious fucking question and is harder than winning a game of rock-paper-scissors.) Will I always feel comfortable and able to say whatever comes to mind? (Nope.) But relax. One of the most hopeful results of this experiment: No one punched me in the face, whatever faux pas I committed. In fact, to the person, everyone I asked to participate in Operation Black Friend agreed. There is a tremendous amount of goodwill out there. All you need to do is turn off the Radiohead and walk out the door.
