Furthermore, friendship, once it is established, involves a kind of commitment that means (in the Faulknerian formula) you care about your friends in spite of their faults as much as because of their virtues. Indeed, in certain advanced circles, the approved line is that we should all consider ourselves recovering racists, sexists, homophobes and so forth.
There are other complications. You may have a Mormon friend whose personal generosity toward homeless people, say, awes and humbles you, but who, respectful of the churchs position, isnt on board with same-sex marriage. There are people I know and love from West Africa whose views on gender and sexuality are far from what I think are the right ones. Maybe because we no longer live in the same community, its easier to overlook one anothers heresies.
You might feel less bad about your friends failings if they were not really her fault. She grew up in a racist society, where the sort of thinking she is engaged in was routine. She picked it up the same way she picked up many of her good habits, through normal socialization. Yet thats surely true of you and your other friends too, so its possible to escape these errors. Its not simply that she has these blinkered views, then; its that she wont reconsider them.
Friendship can and should err on the side of tolerance, but big-enough vices beams rather than motes can be an obstacle to it. The key point that Aristotle got right is that friendship is a morally freighted relationship; a friends character matters to a friendship. And whats most disquieting is your friends view that our moral responsibilities to our fellow humans and to our fellow citizens are ones we have as whites and as Blacks, and not as human beings.
To be sure, our racial identities can be relevant to what we do in a society like ours. A white person, noting that she has been served first at a counter points out that a Black person was there first, thereby putting her race to antiracist uses. But the treatment owed to George Floyd as a citizen didnt depend, as your friend apparently believes, on how some other Black people behaved or how he behaved in the past. Your friend presumably doesnt feel accountable for the racist misdeeds of other white people and would balk at being mistreated for this reason.read more
Can I Stay Friends With Someone Who Voices Racist Views?
