Some of my best friends are...

Some of my friends are white; we all know the line that comes before that statement. You know which one I’m referring to, the indignant protestation of any suggestion of having prejudicial tendencies. We’ve all used it, this being South Africa, accusations of racism, be they explicit, implied or expressed through judgemental body language, are as common as street vendors.

Sometimes we even start defending ourselves before any attack, real or imagined. And the easiest line to go for? I am not racist or bigoted; some of my best friends are black, white, nudist, Jewish etc. On occasion, when one really doesn’t have any close comrades then the scratching around begins — “my maid is black and I’m very nice to her”, “my neighbour is gay and we get on like a house on rainbow-hued flames”, “I used to hang with the Greek kids at school” and so forth. The permutations and examples are endless.

The thing is though, does anyone ever buy that excuse? Have you ever heard a person use that defence and thought to yourself, “You know what, I was wrong about James/Mandla, they aren’t racist after all”. Nobody I know buys it, I don’t buy it, yet we are prone to scratch around that area first when defending our diversity credentials. I would love to know how this became the standard excuse and whether it’s ever been enough to absolve anyone of any racial accusations?

On the excuse itself, does having black friends make you less racist? I know plenty of people who have black friends and associate with black people and thus consider themselves non-racist. Yet when you dig deeper you realise every black person they know was introduced to them by another white person, almost as if, a black person is acceptable if they meet certain criteria based on whatever arbitrary personal measures are used by the person in question. Ditto, most black people with friends from another race. As one person put it to me, if you work with a black person every day and go out for drinks on occasion after work and grow to develop a friendship with them, is that not just familiarity having its way with you, despite yourself?

Certainly in a rapidly (rabidly even) aspirant society like ours an argument can be made for class discrimination replacing or supplanting racism, but I believe that when South Africans make friends outside their economic grouping, they are more likely to make friends with folk of the same hue. Is that racism or just being more comfortable with people who share the same values as you? Is that in itself considered racism? If so where is the line drawn? That’s another potentially multi-layered question right there.
I always thought racism manifests in how you treat people at face value and not once you’ve gotten to know them as individuals, who are more than their skin colour, background and beliefs. Am I wrong here?

All that subjectivity relating to how our social habits relate to our prejudices is why I cannot understand how it is that as glib and throwaway a response as “some of my best friends are” came to be commonly used as currency for redemption, and further, why it is that people still use it if it is so worthless that most of us wouldn’t trade it for a barrow-load of Zim dollars.

Still, I would imagine it must seem like gold when one feels cornered. Not that I’d ever feel cornered you understand, I am not racist, some of my best friends are white.