Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we turn to a new podcast that uses pop culture and history to explore the absurdities and intricacies of race as seen from the perspective of an interracial friendship. I'm joined now by childhood friends, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Director of Emeritus of the Schomburg center here in New York, and one of the nation's leading experts on the history and current presence of race and racism and Ben Austen journalist, and the author of High‑Risers: Cabrini‑Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. Their new podcast is called, Some of My Best Friends Are. Khalil, welcome back and Ben, welcome to WNYC.

Khalil: Thanks so much Brian.

Ben: Thanks so much Brian for having us.

Brian Lehrer: It's radio, we're going to be a bit obvious and state for the record. Khalil, you are Black and Ben, you are white. You two have been self-described best friends for 35 years, I see, since your childhoods in Chicago. Why don't you talk a little bit about how you two met and how you became such good friends. Khalil, you want to start?

Khalil: Absolutely. I'm fond of saying that I was 14-years-old. I was an assistant manager of a computer store and I was Ben's boss, back in 1985 when we were freshmen in high school. That's really when we met and he was there to do this piecemeal work. If you remember, back in those days, we had floppy disks that were five and a quarter-inch, and at this computer store, you had to put labels on it to brand the local store. I broke my thumb, we looked for help and Ben was hired to label a whole bunch of disks, and that's how we got started.

Ben: He was a terrible boss. He was really a cruel and abusive.

Brian Lehrer: That's a very good basis for lasting friendship.

Khalil: Yes, just to say that we happened to grow up at a time in the 1980s in this neighborhood that now by many standards is quite exceptional. Integrated community called Hyde Park, it's home to the University of Chicago. It also happens to be home to our former president, Barack Obama and Michelle. It's also the place where Jesse Jackson built his career of civil rights activism, as well as home to the Nation of Islam. This crazy quilt of people, of movements, also spawned this relationship and we've been friends ever since.

Brian Lehrer: Let's stay in the '80s while we get into one of the podcast episodes. In Episode 1, I see you two tackle how white and Black men are portrayed as friends in films. Because you two grew up in the '80s, you mainly cover the classics 48 Hrs and Lethal Weapon. Both are not just buddy cop films, but interracial buddy cop films.

Let's start with 48 Hrs starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, which came out in 1982. We're going to play a clip of it in your Episode 1, starting with Murphy's character speaking to Nolte's character. Ben, do you want to set up this opening scene for our listeners? It's the, we ain't partner scene of 48 Hrs.

Ben: Yes. Eddie Murphy's character is in prison, in jail maybe, and Nick Nolte's character is a police officer who needs to get him out to help him solve a crime. He needs his help, and he's essentially like you said it's radio, Nick Nolte is white, Eddie Murphy is Black. Even though he needs his help, he has these incredibly disparaging ways of greeting him.

Brian Lehrer: Though many of the listeners didn't know about you two, I hope they knew about Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, but here's that 60 second clip of cinema history.

[clip play]

Reggie Hammond: "This is ain't no damn way to start a partnership.

Jack Cates: Now, get this. We ain't partners, we ain't brothers, and we ain't friends. I'm putting you down and keeping you down until Ganz is locked up or dead. If Ganz gets away, you're gonna be sorry you ever met me.

Reggie Hammond: I'm already sorry.

Ben: These buddy films were about crossing the color line, creating relationships. That opening scene we just heard, which has, this classic line, we ain't buddies, we ain't partners and we ain't friends, which sets the moral arc of the story. Which is that, we're going to be buddies, partners and friends, and we're going to do a sequel and we're going to launch all kinds of sequels. I think that it's an important moment to think about the last 40 years since the 1980s and how we got to a moment where we're now talking about systemic racism, because something about the notion of just being together, didn't get us to the promised land.

Brian Lehrer: That, to be clear was that little snippet from the film and then Khalil, from the podcast talking about it. Khalil, at the end of the clip there, you were saying something about the notion of just being together didn't get us to the promised land. What did you mean by that?

Khalil: In the time that we grew up in the 1980s, we were the first generation of post-Civil Rights babies. My parents were born in the 1950s, they lived through the civil rights era. Ben and I are born in 1969 or 71 and 72. We were supposed to be the children of the dream who, by dent of our own hard work and ambition, these relationships, these integrated neighborhoods and schools, which of course were never plentiful and sort of kept out in the 1980s. Was supposed to represent an America that every individual could achieve something.

That was an America that also whitewashed the structural legacies of Jim Crow and of racism in cities like Chicago and also whitewash the unfolding realities of new forms of structural racism, like the criminal justice system. Therefore our relationship was insufficient for us to even understand what was happening in our own community. We couldn't see it for what it was, because partly we were being told to just look out for ourselves and if along the way you have an interracial buddy, then all the better.

Ben: These movies really function in a way that you get this odd couple, and the oddest thing you can get in America in a way is racial difference. Through the course of the film, there's going to be this bonding and coming together, and it's on the most individual sense. At the end of the film, they operate a little bit like Black savior films, where the white character, the white man in almost all these cases is going to be better for their friendship.

It is the easiest sense of racial reconciliation that all you have to do is be buddies with somebody, all you have to do is be friends with somebody. The films don't really demand that much of you. I think that's why Khalil says it doesn't get us to the promised land. It does, here we have this interracial buddy podcast and so in some ways, it opens up the avenues for conversation and for real investigation, but in a bigger sense, it doesn't do more.

Brian Lehrer: Let's relate the film version to the real-life version even more, because you then go on in the podcast to talk about so many other buddy cop interracial films. You talking about Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, I don't think I have to say which one is white, which one is Black. Then you talk about in the Heat of The Night, which of course won Oscars in the 1960s. Blazing Saddles with Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder. The Eddie Murphy Police Academy movies.

I guess my question for you, Ben, is how does the shallowness that you were both describing of the interracial friendships in those films inform what a real-life interracial friendship like the two of yours, or any of the listeners might set a standard for themselves to be. In order for it to either be real between the two of them as the lowest thing, or to help the bigger picture of fighting racism and inequality in a larger sense.

Ben: There is something about these movies that lets you off the hook, and this is our title of the show, which is very literal sense of being friends. Then poking fun at people who say, "No, no, I'm not a racist some of my best friends are X." Yes, you need to go further. This sense of this being even a starting point, it goes from the personal to the collective, or looking at the bigger picture, and it can be very uncomfortable to do that. We happen to have this relationship where we've known each other long enough and not just in the past, but then professionally too. Our adult lives have been completely aligned, we've been investigating the same issues and the same ideas. We've been thinking about this together for 25 years of adulthood after 10 years of childhood.

Brian Lehrer: Khalil, you want to continue on that?

Khalil: Yes. Let me tell a quick story. When I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, which I colloquially describe as the whitest place on earth. A community home to Indiana University where I taught for several years. About 4% Black, about 3% Hispanic and 1% Asian American. It's a community that really is very white. We made lots of amazing friends, families who were overwhelmingly white. I remember at a dinner party, several months into this relationship, the friend, a woman who I'm not going to name or call her out. Anyway, she's a friend and I had been talking about my work because I consume, this is my professional work, it's personal.

She said to me, she said, "Oh, wow is there any moment you don't talk about race?" It's a moment I'll never forget because while the relationship was genuine, there were limits to her desire to hear about this messy, difficult, depressing issue. I think that's the model for this show, which is to say, if you really are friends and you really care about these things, this actually affects everything about the society we live in. This is not just you abiding the frustrations and grievances of your Black, or your Asian, or your Latino friends, but in fact, these things matter to their lives. If you want to be part of making change in this world, you have to care about these issues in every way that they do.

Ben: I think Khalil and Brian, that growing up as a white kid in a predominantly Black neighborhood, in a predominately Black part of Chicago, that's not exceptional in some senses. What Khalil just said, I actually thought about race all the time as well. I was aware of my whiteness and became comfortable with talking about race all the time. I think about it all the time, because I was put in situations where I was like, "Oh, yes, I'm thinking about being in this space as the only white person." We've at least had that baseline where we start.

Brian Lehrer: Which is something that many Black people and other people of whatever kinds of minorities in any context experience, but majorities don't, in this country white people generally don't. Being aware. That's so central to the whole racial justice and whiteness conversation in this country right now. Is that white people have so many blind spots, because we never have to think of ourselves as white, or rarely have to think of ourselves as white. We just think of ourselves as people too easily, too casually, because we're not in a position with enough people who are not white that it gets thrown in our face.

Ben: Those people need to listen to Some of My Best Friends Are.

Khalil: Absolutely, and the Brian Lehrer Show.

Brian Lehrer: We'll take it, we'll blurb each other. Listeners, do you want to contribute to this conversation talking about race through interracial friendships? 646-435-7280. We have a few minutes to bring you in too. Who has a friend who's white if you're Black, or Black if you're white, other racial parents too, but the podcast is about the basic American racial history dynamic of Black and white. How have your interracial friendships influenced your thinking about issues surrounding race, or maybe not as much as they could have. Or just how you take other people's humanity into account as a function of having actual interracial friendships, or whatever story you want to tell along these lines. Make it a personal story.

646-435-7280. 646-435-7280 or ask any question you want to ask our guests Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ben Austen, who have this new podcast together, called Some of My Best Friends Are. 646-435-7280. Khalil, if I judge from some of the media, and books and stuff of the last few years, it seems almost like the trend is going the other way, that having interracial friendships is so exhausting. People use that word especially on the Black side. That sometimes I just don't want to try anymore. I'm just not spending time with my white friends and maybe it goes the other way too.

Because things just seem so complicated and I have to keep correcting things that are subtly unintentionally racist or whatever. Do you see, do you experience that?

Khalil: I'm seeing it in the same way that you define the trends. I've learned from many of these wonderful writers who have spoken to this ongoing challenge. In other words, the burden of explaining what's going on in the country seems to always fall on the Black part of the relationship, and then you feel like it doesn't go anywhere. I think that's exactly why the show is a tongue-in-cheek critique of that burden. To say that, just because you can have the conversation doesn't mean that you're actually committed to change.

What you'll find and what our listeners will find in the show as the season evolves, is that we move from the relationship in the 1980s as a way of opening up a different conversation about what structural racism actually is. That burden is duly shared by Ben in his own reporting, his commitment to understanding these issues, personalizing it where it matters, and of course, it's what I do for a living. That is what we want the relationship to be about. About parity, about shared responsibility for the change that actually needs to happen.

Brian: By the way, there are many things in society that need to be corrected, but maybe nothing more than that I accidentally said Eddie Murphy starred in Police Academy, it was actually Beverly Hills Cop. Just putting that on the record. Got to have priorities. Dan in Matawan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dan.

Dan: Hi, Brian, how are you doing? Hey, fellas.

Khalil: Hey.

Ben: Hey.

Brian Lehrer: What you got for us?

Dan: I really appreciate the theme of the podcast, I'm actually in a band called Gangster Grass and we do a combination of bluegrass and hip hop music. We're constantly involved in exactly that conversation in a different way. It's focused on the idea of what's conceived of as Black music and white music. We actually get into deconstructing how that's not really a helpful division and how that stuff was created over time by record label marketing departments and how it influences our conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Call Lil Nas X, right?

Dan: Yes. We've been doing it for maybe 10 or so years before he did, but yes we appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: On a personal level, what do you get from it? What do your colleagues get from it?

Dan: Just so much of the stuff that you've already been talking about. We started it just purely as a musical idea, just because it would be a cool idea to hear these sounds together. In doing it and then spending the time together, in traveling and touring the country, we've just been necessarily put into positions to have these conversations constantly and just be learning more and more about each other's life experiences.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. We're going to go on to Kate, in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kate.

Kate: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I just turned on the radio and got in on this, which is a perfect timing. My daughter just started kindergarten and there's three African-American children in her class and that's who she's become friends with.

Brian Lehrer: How many white kids may I ask?

Kate: I would say 15. This is her first school experience. I grew up in the Midwest, there were very few, it just wasn't diverse where I grew up either. She's coming from a place of complete love and friendship, and as her mom, I want to nurture that in a very loving way and that's how we talk about it but I don't know how to nurture that friendship, because I've never experienced that myself. As a mom, I want to do it in a very respectful, loving way. Without having that shared experience myself, I don't know how to do that.

Brian Lehrer: That's very, very honest. Khalil, Ben who wants to start with her?

Ben: I think about our own experience. We went to a predominantly Black public high school on the south side of Chicago, and then we both went to colleges that were predominantly white. We leave the 1980s and get into the 1990s and we have very different experiences that Khalil is a minority and I'm in the majority. We've come back together after that or talked throughout those times. To go through all of those together, that has been an incredible learning experience.

Khalil: Just to the last caller, there's a genre of Black kids growing up in pockets of America, whether it was a Deep South or even Northern Cities saying I grew up with white friends up to a point and then they left me, they abandoned me. They treated me like I was different, they were not genuine friends. When I say genre, meaning these stories are often told in memoir and autobiography. I think the challenge is that parents have an obligation to cultivate those relationships, recognizing the fullness of the lives led by the minority in the relationship.

That it's not just the exception of like, "Look, this is perfect, this is good enough." Because we know that kids are socialized into a toxic society where racism and bigotry are very much keen to how people's lives are led, and also the structures that they encounter. That those children like Ben and I, when we went to college, I literally encountered the stakes of racism for the first time at scale. Rodney King was beaten, affirmative action was being criticized in college. I felt my minority position for the first time, I sought sanctuary among Black friends in the way that I hadn't in high school.

Then, Ben, of course, is looking at it from another perspective and ends up in South Africa, trying to learn about apartheid real-time as a graduate student. Of course, our story may be unique in this way, but this is the work that is required for parents to cultivate that kind of sincere engagement with the world we live in with our children.

Brian Lehrer: Kate, any reflection on that? Is that helpful? Does it give you any direction?

Kate: Yes, it's incredibly helpful. Like I said, I grew up in a place diverse, I'm learning right along with her, and I come from a place of just giving her love and telling her, "We love everyone." That's all she knows. You're right. It's talking about it and explaining to her, and just keep doing what I'm doing. We love everyone, we're all the same, we're all equal, and that's all she knows. I will continue doing what I'm doing and just educate myself right along with her.

Brian Lehrer: Kate, thank you for your openness and contributing to this conversation. Angela in Bushwick, you're on WNYC. Hi, Angela.

Angela: Hi. How are you doing, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What have you got for us?

Angela: A friend of mine last month said she needed to speak to me. She's Italian, German, and her partner is a man of color, he's African-Caribbean. She said she needed to know whether she was being overly sensitive or not, because sometimes when they have company, and she's the only Caucasian person there, and they'll make generalizations about white people. "You know how white people are, they're nasty, or they have their dog in bed, and you know how white--" They have offensive comments, but she didn't know whether she was being overly sensitive, how should she addressed it, what should she do?

When she said that to me, it made me think, "Wow, it's not really nice." I think everyone makes some stereotypical comments or generalizations, and you don't necessarily mean it, but it's just things that are said. What I said to her was maybe in a joking way, say, "Hey, wait a minute, white person over here, I don't have a dog that sleeps on my bed." Or, "It's a good thing I have a tough skin, because otherwise I'd be really offended by what you just said because after all, I am white."

Try and not be confrontational about it, and maybe her a partner have a conversation with him. In that mixed company, because I think sometimes when you have someone that looks other than you, and you accept them, and you don't see them any differently than you are, then you make those comments and you forget, "Hey, wait a minute, there is a white person sitting here."

Then I do have another friend, white blond hair, blue eyes, and she hangs out with us. When we have functions, parties, then she goes, "You know I'm going to be the first person here because I'm white," or, "Yo know your black ass is going to be late." We joke around, and it's okay, it's a joke, and we can make fun of it, but she is a part of our group on a regular basis.

My girlfriend who's not in this country, Italian-German, it bothers her and I felt bad about it, because I know sometimes things that can be said, and you forget, and you make those comments. That was my suggestion to her just like, "Hey, wait a minute. I am white after all, you are talking about me too."

Brian Lehrer: Who wants to talk to Angela?

Ben: Yes. Angela, I think that's exactly right. I was saying before about white people generally feel incredibly uncomfortable when you point out their whiteness, because that's very unfamiliar to us, that doesn't happen that often. This gets into the whole notions of white fragility and a lot of the racial dynamics talks we've had recently. There's also what you said before about puncturing that. Like the show, we talked about the absurdities of race. Looking at something like 48 Hours that this is the genesis of a lot of comedy as well. That there are differences and you can explore them openly and even play with them. We have a good washcloth joke in one of the first episodes.

Angela: Washcloth?

Brian Lehrer: A washcloth joke?

Angela: I know what that's about, yes.

[laughter]

Ben: I'm speaking to you Angela.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: I don't know what that's about, so I'm going to have to listen to the podcast unless you think it's for mixed company.

Ben: There's a joke that white people don't use washcloths when they shower.

Khalil: This is open to a future episode where we read the Obama memoirs Becoming and A Promised Land. You'll have to listen for that episode in a couple weeks to hear it.

Brian Lehrer: Definitely. All right. Angela, thank you, keep calling us. One more, and then we're going to be out of time. Victoria, in Montclair, you're on WNYC with Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ben Austen, co-host of the new podcast, Some of My Best Friends Are. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you. What have you got for us?

Victoria: I'm a Black woman. I wanted to talk about how it's been very difficult for me to have white friends and white trusting friends. Because of certain microaggressions about color, hair texture, certain things that I do, and how that has made me afraid of being friends with white people. Because I always have to stay on guard because I have to be able to nip those comments in the bud before it gets to me, type of thing. Those microaggressions, even if you're pretty close with people, there's only a certain level you can get to where they're going to be like, "Oh, you just need to stop being so sensitive about what you're saying to me."

Brian Lehrer: Who can help Victoria or just hear her?

Khalil: I think that's such a wonderful testimony. It goes to what I mentioned earlier about the limits of these relationships sometimes. Because partly, the cost of the relationship is checking your racial baggage at the door if you're the Black person in the relationship. Being overly sensitive, and saying, "We are your friends, of course, we don't think that way." The problem is they do. The authenticity of these relationships should be based on the fact that we don't want anyone in the world to engage in these casual stereotypes, in ways of making people feel as though they are exotic.

For Black women in particular, that's a real challenge in school settings, where they are in fact the minority. I think the show for us, is to model exactly, one, that genuine relationships see people for who they are as individuals, as human beings. Then from there, the world that we live in, the issues that we care about are about climate change, about economic inequality, about justice, about social and racial justice. That's where we want these relationships to be grounded in and not simply in the-- Of course, we need friends for all sorts of reasons, but we need to not allow Black people to bear the burden of keeping those issues, or Latino people out of the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: You want to reflect back on that Victoria, or leave it there?

Victoria: I often feel that those conversations end up being so anxiety-ridden. The fact that Black people in general, have to deal with so many microaggressions every single day from being followed into the store, to not even having a space in a certain place because people only see them as objects. When a friend does that to you, it can be very painful, and you let out all the anger from the past week onto that one person. I think sometimes it's just too heavy a conversation and it feels like the other friends need to educate themselves, so it's not always my duty to be like, "Yes, can we not talk about my hair today." Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: To do the work. Victoria, thank you so much. There's so many stories if we had more time that we could continue to take. Here's one very short on Twitter. Somebody wrote, "Being pals means giving the benefit of the doubt even when it's ugly. I told my white sister pal, I didn't want to be the only brown person at her wedding except for the help. I skipped the humiliation without making her feel bad. Though it was her special day she thought it was a reasonable request."

We'll leave that there as food for thought as we give profound thanks to our guests, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Ben Austen, journalist and author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. Their new podcast together it's called Some of My Best Friends Are. You can find Episode 1 out now, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Ben: Hey, Brian, thank you so much.

Khalil: Yes, we really appreciate it. Thank you.

 

 

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