seeking out friends of a specific race - why this is wrong, is it even wrong, discuss this

i know someone who is intentionally seeking friends of a specific race in the (vaguely stated) interest of having a diverse friend group?
im kind of failing at explaining to him why this is fucked up. maybe it isn't?
obv the potential friends arent apprised that they are being befriended to fill out a white dude's racial dossier?
the response has essentially been: "it is good to desire a diverse group of friends"

he'll get punched eventually if it's any consolation

anyway it's probably wrong? seems like one dude's specific problem, though. does this actually happen that often, like as a considered, committed plan?

Is he working on season two of Girls?

"let's see...today i need to pick up cat food, mail that comcast payment, and befriend a negro."

i dont know, ive never heard anyone express it this openly. i definitely feel like its something people do, tho probably not as a carefully considered plan

i can't even imagine the three-mile-island levels of liberal guilt that would prompt this.

does he hang out in inuit bars and say stuff like hey i really like your mukluks, where did you get them??!! and then invite them over for tea? that would be kinda weird.

i told him if his friend group is lacking diversity in some way to figure out why/how he has managed to only develop friendships with white people and just address/change those things, not just go out with the aim of befriending a black person or w/e, not sure if this was appropriate response

how old is this dude?

I think there's enough room for a much less emotional assessment, like, a cold curiosity or awareness that it's maybe not...socially okay? to not know any people of color? ANY color?? That would still be racist, I guess, and definitely WEIRD but I can imagine it being without "liberal" "guilt."

im not really sure what his methods are, im not sure its possible for non-problematic methods of doing this to exist

1. Is he young enough to make such well-intentioned crassness forgivable
2. Does he inhabit an environment where making non-white friends would require special effort?

are straight people a race

straight people are a virus

Maybe he's planning to say something racist and needs cover, like this guy.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/charlie_webster_black_voter_fraud.php

"There’s nothing about me that would be discriminatory. I know black people. I play basketball every Sunday with a black guy. He’s a great friend of mine."

i mean he could be hanging around outside the black cultural center at school handing out flyers for all i know

xxp
1. he is p young but old enough to know better imo
2. no special effort should be necessary afaict

i kinda prefer talking to people from other countries to be honest. i learn stuff. and i will never go to their countries so its interesting to hear different points of view from elsewhere. most of the people i hang out with our white but they are also like the 1% of funny/creative/smart white people that i can tolerate. no offense to white america but they kinda bore the crap out of me mostly. i've worked in public for so many years and i have one of those faces that make people tell me their life story forever and its so refreshing to talk to people with more i dunno euro-flair or jamaica-flair or anywhere but here flair. i'm kind of a grump though.

i feel that and agree, but this is enjoying people with cultures/backgrounds different from your own when they happen to come into your life, which is p vastly different from actively seeking out friends on the basis of race alone

i'm a citizen of the world. even though i never go anywhere. pretty sure i could live in any country and be happy. i just hate traveling.

working across the street from the opera school in philly for years! what a trip! they were so mental those divas. they were from everywhere. so much fun to listen to. i miss accents and other languages. boston accent doesn't count.

yeah targeting people specifically is kinda creepy for any reason.

x-post

xp In that case he's definitely being weird. It's fine to desire a diverse group of friends but not to pursue one like you're casting a commercial.

agreed.

pretty sure its wrong, def sure that it is dumb as shit

i mean part of it is that thinking that way implies that cultivatin friendships w/non-myrace dudes take a special sort of effort which might be why he isnt batting 1000 in the first place

How ever well intentioned he is, people are not baseball cards.

yes, yes

i get so angry when discussing things that this that its hard to articulate these things, also they just seem so basic/not something you ever expect to find yourself explaining to someone

things LIKE this

the social human mind is a mysterious, confusing & often horrifying thing

hmmn tempted to c&p crut to

A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

i think this can be kind of semi-legit depending on where you are in the world; if you're living in a metropolitan city and are constantly surrounded by and interacting with people of a specific race then it's one thing & what justen said applies, but if you're living somewhere a little more racist then he's at least got the right idea i think

like i suspect this guy is probably well-meaning, have no reason to doubt he could be a good friend to a person of a specific race, even if his initial motivation is suspect

i guess what i mean is, i think his initial assumption "it is good to desire a diverse group of friends" is basically true, and looking at your group of friends and realizing they are not diverse and not feeling okay about that is positive. it might make you wonder why, might inspire reflection on your past interactions with and attitudes towards non-white people, make you think of ways you could change those attitudes within yourself

If you only have one black friend, then shame on you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b6KDLkxmnU

it's wrong because it's objectifying, and strongo otm in his first post. this reminds me of a white woman i am no longer friends with who seemed vaguely disappointed that she "boringly" ended up married to a white dude rather than a black dude or a woman and it always skeeved me out and i was like "maybe the reason none of those relationships worked was because the black dude/woman/whoever it is politically progressive to date(<---ew at this whole notion) figured out what you were up to and decided they'd rather be treated like a person."

you should tell him to hang out around campus brochure photo shoots

I don't think this is necessarily any more wrong than any other kind of tourism.
that said, there's always that innate skeeviness to tourism.

this kind of racial neediness or w/e usually comes off as super obvious if thats any help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbzfvef0aE0&feature=related

white people are the worst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SddXgXMzoo4

many xposts

". it might make you wonder why, might inspire reflection on your past interactions with and attitudes towards non-white people, make you think of ways you could change those attitudes within yourself"

yeah, that's what he should do, but he's skipping this self-reflection and just trying to grab some pals real quick to remedy the problem

we're all just gonna friend until we're all the same color, man

you'd kinda hope that the ppl he's seeking out would sense the fakeness/tryhard-ness of his outreach and just cut him loose.

I mean, it's not the same thing at all but I knew a girl who felt it was her mission to befriend other women she saw as 'projects' whose lives she could better by being friends with them. In a really creepy samaritan way. Most women eventually picked up on her need to 'improve' her friends and quickly shut the whole friendship down.

Don't underestimate the ability of people to sense a lack of genuine-ness. Or whatever the correct word for that is.

oh im sure the ppl are going to be pissed off

In a case of legitimate friendship, the body has a way of shutting that whole thing down xp

which inuit bars?

lol silby

This person does not 'need a friend of a specific race'. This person just needs to get out there and talk to someone of that race who seems available to talk to, bcz this person seems utterly and completely out of touch with the fact that such people are real, and not just little icons of ethnicity or some shit like that.

maybe you can make him a bingo card

seeking a friend for the end of the race war

Man, i can't make seem to manage to make new friends AT ALL, let alone ones pre-chosen on the basis of race

^^^

otm

i do not expect successful friend-making from this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXe8PFKsOIc

I think the only adequate approach to take here is that of Roxy's friend's psychologist, who would say that while it's not prohibited for white people to specifically seek out friends of a specific race, it is (shall we say) "very very interesting" that one would choose to do that, then tell people that is your goal, all leading up to a general chin-scratching steeple-fingered "very interesting, Roxy's friend, you are very interested in people of other races."

Man, i can't make seem to manage to make new friends AT ALL

well now you can blame affirmative action

if he succeeds he will have solved the problem of not having a diverse group of friends but replaced it with the more heinous problem of being someone who seeks out friends based on race (this is obv to all of us it seems, but maybe that's a way to explain it to him why it's fucked up?)

roxy have you asked him if he plans on telling these prospective friends about his plan?

and if he says no, try asking him "why not?"

Best Arguments for Miscegenation: The Biracial Hotties Thread

lol some dude

Biracial Hotties thread is full of malware, apparently

oh, jaymcpaws.

I wish we could kill white people!

Remember a friend telling me at university that he was desperate to have sex with a black girl and an asian girl to find out if it was different to having sex with a white girl. He was very drunk at the time, as I recall, but still. He's a solicitor now. Just got married.

there are certainly one or two white people i wish we could kill.

I'm glad he didn't turn out to be successful, what an injustice THAT would have been.

I thought we had had a contentious thread about this topic already but I could only find this

how many of your friends/'aquaintances' are of races/cultures other than your own?

it was probably buried somewhere in a 9,000 post thread about how momus felt trying to have sex with asian women qualified him for a macarthur grant.

either way I think "trying to have sex with women of different races" is more of a guy thing than it is "weird stuff white people do because they suck"

it's like misogyny with a creamy racist filling

oh im sure the ppl are going to be pissed off

― flag this post and die (roxymuzak), Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess it depends on how much of a dick your friend is going about it, but there're plenty of friendly people out there

i definitely had the experience of getting to college and befriending more people of different races/nationalities/etc. than i had before, as did a lot of people, but sometimes some of these people were a little too overly aware or preoccupied with that fact, and after a while joking about your 'token _____ friend' or whatever is both unfunny and off-putting.

I sort of want to give people a break for being headed in the right direction on their own personal journey, but otoh that is not anyone else's problem technically.

when I went to college, I spent some time seeking out people of my own race to befriend because I grew up in whitey mcwhitesville, USA

watching privileged boarding school kids try to one-up each other with fake "from the hood" stories is truly an amazing sight btw

also when I said "fuck it" and just started befriending singers, I suddenly had a ton of black friends

that happened to me too, except i joined the black panthers

strangely no one seems to have noticed yet

Eleven minutes ago a FB friend, a former classmate of my elementary school, posted this exchange between her and her son.

KID: mama u know that whole black & white thing u told me about?
ME: What black & white thing?
KID: That whole, it d/n matter if ur black or white or diff u treat everyone equal no matter what( whoosh he was listening-patting myself on the back! AWESOME PARENTING!
ME: yes
KID: Well some one prejudiced me today.
Me(attack mode engaged): how?
KID: Well someone spilled milk and that area was dirty so I went to a clean area to sit down & this lady was a total B - word, yelled at me & told me to sit at the other table so I did, but then my friend Chris went & she let him sit where I wanted no screaming no nothing!And I KNOW WHY! Because he has blonde hair & mine is dark WHAT A RACIST RIGHT! i really feel bad for the black people. racism hurts! WHAT A RACIST B WORD RIGHT mama?
ME; ROFL... Still ROFL!!!

http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slides/photos/002/246/137/OLYMPICS-BLACK-POWER-SALU-008_display_image.jpg?1337793359

that australian silver medallist was a mensch

he was ostracized by the australian athletics establishment afterwards for supporting the right of the americans to make the salute

they're p cool with him now that everyone thinks it's cool tho

yeah well he's dead so

australians are passionately against the racism of 40 years ago

i mean part of it is that thinking that way implies that cultivatin friendships w/non-myrace dudes take a special sort of effort which might be why he isnt batting 1000 in the first place

― Me order! Me Fieri! Me run Flavortown! (jjjusten), Thursday, November 15, 2012 4:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

also this entire concept is preposterous

Remember a friend telling me at university that he was desperate to have sex with a black girl and an asian girl to find out if it was different to having sex with a white girl. He was very drunk at the time, as I recall, but still. He's a solicitor now. Just got married.

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Friday, November 16, 2012 9:31 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i have a gal pal who told me about having sex with a black pal of ours, she felt compelled to throw in that it was no different than having sex with anyone else

If it had been different, would she have said so?

lol and like what was she even expecting to be so different?

Man, i can't make seem to manage to make new friends AT ALL, let alone ones pre-chosen on the basis of race

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, 16 November 2012 04:46 (17 hours ago) Permalink

^^^

― Fieri-brand sausages into my and your ready holes (silby), Friday, 16 November 2012 04:48 (17 hours ago) Permalink

^^^haha man this. putting effort into going any place at all besides school and work might help idk...

"i think all of our male friends secretly have the same dick and just take turns using it!" xp

some people should keep all their thoughts to themselves.

better rhythm?

Yeah, that Biracial Hotties thread was not my best moment on ILX.

It's cool. Back when I was in high school, my psychologist went off on a similar tangent once. "I mean, just take a look at Mariah Carey..."

to be fair, a p good example

some people should keep all their thoughts to themselves.

― estela, Friday, November 16, 2012 4:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

truth bomb

Yeah, that Biracial Hotties thread was not my best moment on ILX.

― Sandy Denny Real Estate (jaymc), Friday, November 16, 2012 5:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf i seem to recall that i might be responsible for the actual title (from a conversation we had irl re: a mutual friend), my apologies to the ppl of ilx and the world