Women, Inter-Racial Friendship and the Politics of Envy

Surrounded by Eurocentric mindsets kept me deeply confused

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I was about to embark on a very long train journey across Zimbabwe and desperately needed a pen to think things through in my journal but . . . my Whyte feminist friend flatly refused to give me her cheap ballpoint, when she had easy access to more — and I did not.

How often do we women of colour find sweetness on the surface of an inter-racial friendship, with a dose of secretly delivered poison beneath, paralysing us so that we give up on ourselves and our dreams? This has been my situation for so long. Under unrelenting attack from the Muslim fundamentalist fraternities, I needed to believe in my liberal socialist feminist friends and find community with them. But by and large, I did not.

From childhood to college days here in the North of England during the 1970’s, I was facing blatant forms of racial abuse on the streets going to and from school. And our house had the windows smashed so often, the insurance company refused to insure them. It was always working-class, young males acting up — sneering, name-calling, and smashing the windows. The police generally arrived too late to do anything about the ongoing racial harassment; the calls to ‘go back home,’ were yelled amidst every nasty racist term…