Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships (Paperback)

by Emily Bernard (Author) "My mother will deny this but it's true..." (more)
Key Phrases: sneaker store, interracial friendships, New York, Los Angeles, Puerto Rican (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
As if friendships weren't complex enough, Bernard offers essays that add the additional layer of complication that comes when friends are of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. A young Korean American Harvard student, part of a posse of blacks, Hispanics, and a mixed Korean and black friend, tries to bridge his life between campus and the streets of Philadelphia; an Italian, the first of his family to attend college, ponders a friendship with a black intellectual who challenges his assumptions about race and ethnicity; a black woman considers the white men who have served as friends and mentors, including a Jewish godfather and the writer John Hersey. These heartfelt essays explore the difficulties of maintaining friendships through disappointments and betrayals, including what makes some last a lifetime and others collapse at the first sign of strain, and the stresses that are added by the real and imagined boundaries of racial identity. Among the 15 diverse contributors are Trey Ellis, Pam Houston, Luis Rodriguez, Susan Straight, William Ayers, and Darryl Pinckney. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (June 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060082771
• ISBN-13: 978-0060082772
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #736,202 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In America, the Racists are Still Winning, May 11, 2007

By	Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is an eclectic collection of testimonials by those occupying America's most infamous "no mans land," the intersection on the nation's Social grid between the dominant racist culture and those struggling to integrate it -- despite the nation's deep reservoir of racism.

In every instance, these are quiet but profoundly heroic tales about those struggling out on the very slippery precipice of our society trying to maintain a modicum of dignity while not genuflecting under the withering pressure to conform to the omnipresent racist norms and standards. Almost all have willingly paid the price in living lives, often of quiet desperation, always of self-imposed denial and always by distorting their own lives to coexist with a racist way of life.

More than anything else, this is a mostly upbeat reminder of how deeply embedded the newest form of racism, the seemingly more benign, yet much more (passive) aggressive form, is.

Even though this group straddling America's no mans land is slowly increasing, they remain stranded "in" but never completely "of" America. They are often brutally cut off by both sides of the color divide from the normal connections one would find in a more civilized society. Yet, they push on relentlessly, surprisingly making a much larger impact on the racist culture than their numbers would suggest.

Thank God for their courage! For the sake of the rest of us they must keep pushing!

In a more perfect world, or in an America that took its cherished values and principles seriously, there would be no need for these stories, or a need for telling them. This book proves, with dramatic "lived" evidence that in America, despite exaggerated claims to the contrary: the racists are still winning. Five Stars.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A moving collection on a difficult subject., February 10, 2005

By	B. Horrigan (MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendships (Hardcover)

Emily Bernard tackles a complex and often uncomfortable subject with grace, humor, and true feeling. Her selection of contributors is intriguing and they approach the subject from all sorts of angles you might not expect. Truly a means to opening a very important dialogue.