“…stupid niggers”.
No way. There’s no way she said that. Let me rewind and make sure I heard that correctly.
“…stupid niggers”.
Okay, wow. She really said that.
It was July 2019 and I was living and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda. Sitting on my bed in my tiny house, I clicked on a story about an incident that took place when a white woman, Nancy Goodman, verbally accosted two black women in a restaurant in North Carolina. She approaches them and begins shouting about how loud and rude they are (despite them providing no cause for this). Finally, she walks away, shaking her head, and audibly leaving the sting of the racial epithet written above. I watched and rewatched the videos which showed the altercation and then the interview afterward in which Nancy explains that her age (72) and state of mind (very anxious) are what led her to say the things she did.
I’m pretty sure I laughed out loud at the absurdity of her excuses. And then I became quite sober. Something about this particular instance of blatant interpersonal racism rattled me into a state of reflection about my personal experiences as a black woman in America. Words, phrases, and memories all came rushing to the surface of my mind and sort of coalesced into an image that bore my face but that didn’t bear my name. Instead of “Bethany”, the image simply read “A Safe Black Friend”.
Well, that seems worth investigating, I thought to myself. And hence, my confessions, the confessions of a safe black friend.
Why Confessions? Why Now?
Sitting on my bed in Rwanda, reading about Nancy Goodman, and thinking about my life, I realized that I needed to better understand my experience as a black American woman and that writing would be a tool to help me do so. Hence, this project is both deeply personal and purposeful; I am writing as much to untangle my thoughts as I am to explain them. I took a personality test a few years ago called the enneagram and discovered that my type, the nine, is very uncomfortable with conflict. For most of my life, I’ve thought that appeasement was the same thing as keeping the peace. But more recently I’ve come to appreciate how that approach is unhelpful and ultimately unsustainable. Confessions is my way of trying to shake off my old habits of appeasing white friends and peers. It is my way of liberating myself to become a more authentic version of myself.
As far as the timing, in some ways, I’ve been preparing this project for many years (more on that later). But something happened while I was living in Rwanda. I found myself with the mental and emotional space to tackle writing about these issues with new perspectives that I gained during my tenure as a Peace Corps volunteer. As the year 2021 begins, I’m synthesizing and sharing my words as much to give myself a fresh start as to give you, my reader, a fresh take.
I’m sitting on my bed in Boston ready to post this, the beginning of a story, my story, the story of a black woman who is done being safe.