The Black Friend

 The Black Friend is supposed to be teaching white people not to be racist. Good luck with that. 

"..every interaction is som weya is influenced by race." I used to tell bus drivers, "thank you for coming to work today." That brief interaction was not based on anything other than the person was driving the bus that got me where I wanted to go.

"Green bean casserole is a form of white oppression."  I do not get that. Did he mean white people force blacks to eat green bean casserole? I was not much aware green bean casseroles existed until lately. I have a vague recollection of someone making it once. 

Sunday dinner at a white friends house was also the first time he tasted "devil's vomit." (also called date loaf) I did not want to get up and find what type of drug that is. Oh, after many paragraphs, he explains it was desert, that looked like a banana loaf or carrot cake. I never heard of date loaf (made with dates.) Yet he seems to think date loaf is a typical white family desert. 

In one of his shaded gray inserts he says "If you are white and you are reading this, do not read that word." WTF If you do not want white people to read a word, leave it out of the book. Better yet, stop using it; stop saying it in movies, and repeating it over and over in hard core rap music. Yeah, it is authentic when in movies about, um, "the boyz in the hood?" 

A Richard Wright, James Baldwin, or Walter Mosley he is not. Um, I can not recall if Mosley's characters use the word. That is not the only 'thou shalt not," in The Black Friend.