Can I Stay Friends With Someone Who Voices Racist Views?

I find it very disturbing.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story August 29, 2020 Illustration by Tomi Um   The Ethicist Can I Stay Friends With Someone Who Voices Racist Views? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on what vices we should forgive in a friendship — and what we shouldn’t. By Kwame Anthony Appiah A dear friend has said something that is causing me to re-evaluate our friendship. I recently hosted a few women at a small get-together to celebrate a birthday. All four of us have been close for many years. In the course of conversation, we began to discuss current events, including the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. This friend said that she couldn’t see why Black lives should matter to us (we are all white) when Black lives don’t even seem to matter to other Blacks. She cited Black-on-Black crime and, in particular, the recent death of a young African-American girl who was killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. (I should mention that all of us live in an affluent, predominantly white suburb of a major metropolitan city that is predominantly Black and poor. Prior to the pandemic, this city was experiencing something of a renaissance but still had a long way to go.) Our friend also noted that she was disgusted by the outpouring of attention and love at George Floyd’s funeral. After all, she said, he did not live a very virtuous life and did not deserve to be “treated like a saint.” The rest of us spoke up immediately. We tried to explain that George Floyd was the last straw after hundreds of years of discrimination. We told her that George Floyd is representative of all the other African-Americans who have been unjustly arrested, and often killed, for no reason other than the color of their skin. This went on for a while, but she was unmoved and held firmly to her position, which I believe was shockingly racist. We eventually changed the subject and remained friendly for the rest of the evening. However, I cannot get this event out of my mind. I find it very disturbing that a close friend of mine would express such racist views. Can I remain friends with someone whose personal belief system is so contrary to my own? Read the Ethicist’s response here. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT THIS WEEK’S MAGAZINE D'Angelo Lovell Williams for The New York Times   Feature How a New Wave of Black Activists Changed the Conversation George Floyd’s killing galvanized a nation. But small groups like the queer-led collective Black Visions are channeling that energy into a movement for political change. By Jenna Wortham Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times   Feature Convicted of Sex Crimes, but With No Victims An online sting operation to catch child predators snared hundreds of men. What were they really guilty of? 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