Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  “White people like me.” I shrug.

  “They’re not known for their taste, babe.” She snorts, sitting down next to me.

  “Why are all your friends Black?” I push back, grabbing the melted Venti concoction from her hand and taking a sip from the wet straw.

  “I fuck with some white people,” she says eventually. “But you have to feel safe to be friends with someone. You in danger every time I see you, girl.”

  This life philosophy lives in the unwavering stare and hardened features she reserves for the gaggles of frat bros that ogle her at bars and whisper something to one another. It’s admittedly pretty cool to see an entire swim team look away like ashamed toddlers.

  Morgan is still in my life nine years later, which neither of us expected at the time of graduation. She’ll agree to dog-sit for me for a weekend while I’m traveling and stay for fifty-one extra days when I return, becoming a de facto roommate. We won’t see each other for months, and then a text request and money transfer into her account and she’ll begin to design my website out of nowhere when I need one, another skill she just happens to have. Along with proofreading, interior decorating—the advanced kind, with color swatches—and the all-around uncanny ability to live a lifestyle several rungs above her income by extensively planning. The woman is vexingly good at every last thing. The cover to this book? She designed it. No, really. Conceptualized it out of nowhere as a favor for my book proposal and nailed it so hard that HarperCollins looped her in. It’s not all praises either, mind you. Morgan is also—and I say this knowing full well she is reading this exact excerpt of my book and not a page more because my writing “ugh, sounds so Ben Philippey”—just the rudest woman alive to me. Occasionally, I feel emboldened by this. If Nina was a soul sister, Morgan is the type whose pigtails I enjoy pulling.

  “Do you ever think about the fact that all the men you date are punks?” I declare one day out of boredom, falling back onto my guest bed, watching Morgan get ready for a date during one of her extended dog-sits at my place. She swipes left on 99 percent of men of all ethnicities because she knows she is stunning and doesn’t need the seemingly neverending column of “gorgeous, heart-eye emoji” they all seem to provide when I glance at her matches. Occasionally, like tonight, a chiseled pleb or square-jawed gym owner will pass muster, taking her to some exclusive club in Tribeca.

  “Excuse me?”

  Morgan is occasionally a fun stovetop to touch.

  “You date punks,” I continue, sounding out each word. “Those poor idiots try so hard for someone who is going to save them as initials on her phone?” I continue, knowing I sound like a whiny little sibling who wants attention. “Poor little punk asses.”

  “I see . . . Do you want to rephrase that?” She chuckles. “I just did my eyes: I’m giving you a chance here.”

  “No, Morgan: I do not want to rephrase that.” I have no plans tonight myself. “I said punk ass. Punk from the Latin punkerus and ass from that thing you don’t wash.”

  I never feel any real sense of danger in annoying Morgan until I’ve annoyed Morgan. Her nails, for the record, are real; which I know from the numerous times they’ve dug into my flesh.

  “OW! Uncle . . . uncle!” I say, muffled and in pain after ten minutes of thrashing. “I can’t breathe, you mare!”

  “You talk so much,” she says, after releasing the arm twisted behind my back and letting go of my head for a merciful gasp of oxygen. “Your life would be so much easier if you were mute. Ever think of that?” she adds with a sigh and not a single hair out of place. Freaking She-Hulk. “See you tomorrow morning!”

  “Remember! He’s lying if he says he’s out of condoms!” I defiantly shout as the front door shuts, watching my dog tail after her toward the door because she too gets entranced by Auntie Morgan. I suppose there’s maybe just a bit of magic on occasion.

  Nineteen

  Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Guy—Emphasis on Guy

  Nina and Morgan were only the first two. My world has become filled with Black women over the years. Friends of friends, neighbors, cousins, fellow authors, and even coworkers. Philosophically, these all amount to the same thing: sisters. I feel something loose in my chest when I spot them. Their existence and successes soothe something in me I can’t quite pinpoint. Teaching at a privileged and liberal college only exacerbates that.

  I’M TWENTY-NINE and let me be clear, 97 percent of my students are truly phenomenal human beings—be it in-progress or fully baked. I don’t want to underplay that vast majority. The challenges of teaching them are interesting and the rewards immense. There are so many permutations of this career path, in which I walked out halfway through the very first workshop I ever taught in 2016 never to look back, so trust me when I say that this 97 percent is a blessing. I will never stop learning from college campuses.

  . . . Three percent of them are, however, Karens in the making. There are no managers to summon yet, but professors and staff whose incompetence is baffling to them at eighteen years of age. They scoff and roll their eyes when displeased. You are their favorite professor until you say something they don’t want to hear or hold them accountable, which reverts you to the gardener’s assistant, messing up the shrubbery. My work inbox is a boxful of receipts of their privilege, at the intersection of adulthood and full-service nannies and tutors:

  “Additionally, I checked: there is no policy outlined in your syllabus that would indicate assignments wouldn’t be accepted after the due date.”

  “My only availability for office hours is Sunday from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Can you meet me in my building lobby at _______________ by any chance? There’s an office area!”

  Students regularly enter my office to haggle down the word counts of their papers; a generation that knows the power of well-timed tears that are then wiped away with a smirk outside your office door once the B- is a B+. My professorial smile aims for a mixture of confidence, approachability, and occasionally a flicker of an eye twitch.

  When I can’t make room for one more student in my twelve-person workshop with a sixty-eight-person wait list (I’m not running a Dead Poets Society—film seminars and workshops are popular with students regardless of the professors assigned), she storms into the department chair’s office and tears up demanding he rectify the situation. He does not. She allegedly proceeds to poll the admitted students on why they got in and she did not. I’m told by amused students I like that my emails are read aloud at the beginning of classes they share with her and that I’m called “an asshole!” Within the safe confines of my own book years later, I might, in return, hypothetically call her a waste of a prep school tuition whose aspirations of Greta Gerwigism will plateau at a beautifully curated Instagram album of flower crowns and hiking photos. But I’m the adjunct professor—the academic version of a starving freelance artist—and she’s the undergraduate student: we both know who has the true infrastructural power here.

  I tiptoe around, describing her actions as “discourteous” to her in an email and inviting her to an informal Q&A with students at the end of the semester, as a show of good faith.

  Thanks, but my dad is a producer so I don’t need the industry insider class, reads the short reply.

  I laugh to myself reading the email in my office and briefly change my Twitter bio to MY DAD IS A PRODUCER before pesky maturity seeps in and I change it back.

  On my way out that night, I tell the story to Cheryl, the interim department administrator. It’s already 10 p.m., and she too is exhausted, getting the bulk of students and faculty requests all day. We are both roughly the same age and rarely get to chitchat freely without a buzzing department around us.

  “That’s nothing!” she bemoans. Cheryl is a Black woman and exudes an easy confidence that might serve her well in these choppy academic waters.

  “At least you get to do this via email,” she says. “I might already be fired.”

  “You’re not fired.”

  She gives me a skeptical look.
A That’s cute, child even though we are both roughly the same age.

  “This student was having problems with her insurance so I tell her she has to register online, right? It’s a long pain-in-the-ass, forty-minute form, but it’s all there on the portal and the deadline is tomorrow. I explain this to her, no thank you, no nothing, and she comes back an hour later with her iPad and drops it on my desk with the portal pulled up for me to fill in. She wants me to type while she reads me the information.”

  Cheryl is a born storyteller, but I recognize that definite eye twitch.

  “And when I stare at her, on the phone, mind you, she just goes, ‘Well, that’s your job, not mine, so.’ ”

  Cheryl repeats the sentence in her best Elle Woods impression. “Well, that’s your job, not mine, so . . . Oof, like a twig, Ben!”

  “Did you smile through it?” I ask.

  Cheryl makes a face. “Barely.”

  “Long day, children?”

  Joan Way startles both of us in the doorway, coat on and a bright scarf around her neck, ready for home. Joan Way (yes, pseudonym) is not just a professor: she is a powerhouse scholar with a résumé that was already impressive when I was born. Africana Studies, English Studies, Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Food Studies, Digital Humanities, and a few others.

  “Hi, Joan!” I say, a little uncertain, always feeling more like a teacher’s assistant than a professor around Joan Way.

  She has heard nothing of our conversation, but her presence brings a slight shift to the air—that fearful trill of things unknown but longed for—as I realize that perhaps for the first time, the three Black employees of the department are in the same room together, decades of seniority between us.

  “What are you two doing here so late?” Joan asks. There’s always a hint of a smirk and a nod as if you are telling her a joke she’s heard before but she doesn’t want to deprive you of the joy of getting to the punch line.

  “Um . . .”

  Cheryl and I share a look of being both grateful for work and enjoying our jobs, but occasionally finding ourselves sighing those sighs, a little worn down being surrounded by so much precious white excellence and no alcohol. Joan Way lets out a single cackle before Cheryl and I can speak.

  “I can’t solve white people being back on their bullshit for you two, sorry.”

  She moves to the communal fridge and collects her thermos, sliding it into her large purse. And with that, she’s off.

  We then hear shouted from the hallway: “You two will be fine. Bite a pillow or something. Good night!”

  Cheryl is dead. Vanquished, laughing loudly enough to be a disturbance to the cleaning staff one floor down, no doubt. That Joan Way exists and endures, in full awareness, is enough for both of us tonight.

  Cheryl and I make plans to grab friendly drinks at some point soon. When I reply to that email chain after getting my grading out of the way the following week, my email bounces. Cheryl has been let go. “There were issues,” I’m told when I ask.

  I have no grand, unifying thesis about Black women here. Too long; didn’t read? They have it much worse than Black men.

  Societally, the polar opposite of the white man in America is the Black woman. What is a passive privilege built into this country’s foundations to one is a series of unspoken hurdles to the other. I have read the statistics and the think pieces and glimpsed or heard some of their experiences navigating the world, but I have not felt it. I never will. Every struggle I experience comes with a basketful of GentleCare triple-ply male privilege.

  And I get it: for many Black men, the phrase “Black male privilege” is a nonstarter. The logic behind that reticence is that whatever privilege a man has is dwarfed by the societal disadvantages that come with Blackness . . . That’s inaccurate. You don’t have to take my word for it, either. In the Renaissance Male Project, author and gender analyst Jewel Woods analyzes the privilege that us Black menfolk (guys, bros, brosephines, XYers, subway leg spreaders) have over the women of our race. And let’s be clear here—it’s a freaking boatload.

  While we Black men might be attuned to the white privilege that we come across in our day-to-day existence, our lens tends to get blurry when it comes to Black women. Woods rightfully argues that male privilege is more than just a double standard. Just like white privilege comes at a cost to people of color, male privilege comes at the expense of women. Men are actively taking from women. (This is according to a 2019 Black Women’s Equal Pay Survey by SurveyMonkey and Lean In.1) Black women in the United States make 39 percent less than white men and 21 percent less than white women.2 Surely, we men can understand this without defensively throwing our arms in the air about how it’s not our individual fault.

  Interpersonally, Black women can experience more race-based emotional trauma in a single relationship—even in a city like New York—than I have my entire life. Without naming names: I’ve read the texts. My God.

  Take it from a brother observing from the sidelines: the absolute amount of crap the sisters of this world go through all but requires dark magic to survive, let alone thrive through it. This isn’t Tinkerbell dancing over your head and summoning fairy dust that smells like daylilies. It’s equivalent exchange magic—the dark stuff. The blood has to be warm and the spices pungent. All the candles go off and your cough turns into a snake, slithering from your throat and hiding under a bookcase filled with grimoires. Ursula is cackling and there are poor unfortunate souls trembling in the background as body and soul are torn apart and stitched together again to start anew each day. That’s Black Girl Magic—dark arts that require exhaustion of the self for a selfie-ready final product.

  Can I read a book on the topic written by an actual woman, no offense? I get it, you’re an ally; but a lot of this book is about your dick.

  Okay, wow, rude: some of this book is about my dick. Some. Like, two pages total. Don’t tell lies. You’ve been hanging out with Morgan. And, sure! These four are great and read nothing alike:

  Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

  Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis

  Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

  Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts

  Twenty

  How to Go through Life without Drowning, Part III

  Like the Lord for some, my weird relationship with swimming was personal and something I only shared with people I trusted. That worked for a few years until I arrived at Columbia University, whose gorgeous campus in uptown Manhattan turned out to be designed to challenge all of my deepest convictions.

  Anyone familiar with the Columbia undergraduate experience will tell you that it is a journey filled with construction-strength red tape at every corner.

  You may be earning an Ivy degree, but know you are also entering a world in which credits are meticulously calculated, with a two-year-plus core curriculum of required classes every student is meant to complete regardless of their major, and a bureaucracy that can leave some students feeling powerless over their own lives.

  The stupidest element of this academic labyrinth is hands down the Columbia Swim Test, a bizarre graduation requirement shared with Cornell, Dartmouth, and MIT. In order to get your degree, you must also—at some point in your four years—present yourself to the basement of the Dodge Fitness Center and swim three lengths of the pool using any stroke. That’s it.

  No one quite knows why we have to do this. There are theories that it was the eccentric requirement of a rich donor whose child had died. It might also simply be a bureaucratic justification for the maintenance of the pool. There are interviews online regularly justifying the practice in newspaper articles.

  “Before I took the swim class, I couldn’t even float across a pool,” a student with goggles on posing in the school newspaper will say. “Now that I’ve taken the course, I can say that even though I’m still scared to fall into the deep end of the pool, I would know what to do.”

  Let�
�s take a moment to explore how that is, objectively, some absolute bull.

  First of all, engineering students in the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia do not have to fulfill this requirement. Should the island of Manhattan suddenly start to sink, those nerds are expected to simply build a boat.

  Secondly, more often than not, it’s the ethnic and underprivileged kids who end up sweating this demented ritual for four years. Most of the white friends or acquaintances I’ve made—especially those of the bro variety—have no problem with the swim test. They look forward to it, in fact, saving it for their last spring semester and treating the whole thing like a midday party. You’ll see them in shorts and sandals, sunglasses on, headed to Dodge Fitness Center with whistles around their neck, for what amounts to a half-hour pool party.

  The issue, as always, was for the rest of us. Even if I didn’t protest the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps establishing a presence on campus or Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being invited to speak at Columbia like my classmates, this was my personal societal issue that made my woke undergraduate blood boil. I cared for myself and for the Tuos—who we’ll get to in a second—of the world: an underclass of insecure man-boys with body issues. They are my people, and our Elysium will come.

  Tuo is my suitemate: a senior with an aggressively receding hairline and a pear shape. At twenty-two, he already looks like a midperforming car salesman with a favorite local stripper he wants to whisk away from it all. International students who don’t have Jet Skis, or at least one childhood friend named Chad, approach the swim test with the proper gravitas of a requirement for their Ivy League degrees.

  “I hope I don’t fail,” Tuo says late one night, practicing on the floor of our suite after I’ve dragged myself home from my typical 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. session at Butler Library, vomiting essays and reading dense sociological texts that I enjoy but forget too quickly once the A-minus-range grade clears. I’m steadily shoveling my way through a mountain of sociology credits that are slowly becoming secondary to my fiction workshops. By the end of college, this will be a fiction degree with a minor in sociology.