In our series about how to be a Good White Friend, we have explored specific situational occurrences that appear within interracial friendships. Its the response when another black life is ended through the far-reaching claws of institutional racism and brute-force policing of black bodies. Its challenging the habit of viewing your black friends through the…
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In team sports, there’s an entire psychology around the advantages of athletes performing near home in an environment with familiar situations and fans versus the disadvantages of being the guest players who are subject to the additional demands of competing in foreign territory without support from a fan-base present. It’s the reason that high-stakes games…
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No one is right all the time. We make mistakes. We step in it. We say the wrong things. It’s a normal human occurrence. What we do and how we handle it when we say or do the wrong thing is what illustrates our character far more than the wrong action or statement itself. A…
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It’s hard to be a member of a wide group of people and feel like you have to prove that you’re different from the “bad ones.” A white person may feel like it’s challenging to have to prove “I’m not racist” when the current social climate feels so charged because of what we see in…
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Tragedy happens everywhere and to every type of person. It’s a part of the human experience. But when deeply tragic, newsworthy events happen, we often feel a brief sadness before self-preservation kicks in and hides our fears in the belief that things like that don’t happen to us. We keep the right company. We live…
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I am a suburban black woman. I didn’t attend an HBCU, so my peers in college were mostly white. From college I entered directly into Corporate America where whiteness is the default, and I live in an area where we are the only black family on our block. My children have often been the only…
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As the world continues to navigate a new way of functioning under the threat of illness brought by COVID-19, essential businesses and services are now requiring patrons to wear masks. It’s a protocol that assumes everyone is sick or carrying the virus, and the masks prevent the carriers from continuing to spread disease. It’s a…
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Welcome back to the next installation in our series about building new friendships in our adult lives. Growing up takes us in new directions, creates new priorities, and has a tendency to have a big impact on our friendships. In my case, moving around to different states while growing a family created geographic separation between…
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Welcome back to our exploration of ways to build relationships and make friends as an adult. In the first post, we talked about how often adults find themselves feeling alone because life has morphed into something different than we remember from our care-free days of hanging out with friends we organically acquired. With sweeping life…
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Four and a half years ago I found myself on an island. But the worst kind of island. No sand. No palm trees. No ocean. It was that figurative island of moving to a new place where I didn’t know a single person or have any familiarity with the city. It was truly starting over…
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The Well-Adjusted Adult 