Leks and the City, except the city is Oberlin, Ohio, Issue 16: You’re Woke? Show Me Your Black Friends, Stat!
By Lekan Aleshe-Shittu, Staff Writer
So, dear friends… I’ve been watching Girls. In a dizzying haze of preemptive nostalgia, a sad but sweet feeling of impending loss—one brought about by the fact that I will soon graduate, never to step foot in Oberlin, Ohio again—I turned on my laptop and typed Girls into the HBO search bar. That was, if I remember correctly, the first day of senior year. It seemed fated that I should watch Lena Dunham’s magnum opus, the very one so heavily inspired by both her time and the people she met at this here Oberlin College and Conservatory. In the show, Dunham depicts the lives of three very spoiled, very bratty, and sometimes, when they really, really try, mildly loveable Oberlin College alum in New York City. There, engulfed in the riotous spell and insensibility of New York—this frightening, overwhelming and exciting landscape—our protagonists (and alleged adults), make the worst fucking decisons known to man. They act, quite literally, batshit insane.
The world of Girls is full of selfish people; irritating individuals who act as though the planet was made to be placed at their feet, offered up to them on a silver platter. While Dunham herself has said that much of Girls is based on her experiences at Oberlin, I have not met many people here who act as unabashedly unkind and self-interested as the characters do. Yet, I can admit that the show does carry within it a very Oberlin sensibility: it is funny; it is interesting; it is as exasperating as it is beautiful, and it is, many, many times, painfully out of touch with reality. This is what leads me to the meat of Issue 16.
A major critique of the show is that there are no Black people in it. Thousands of people over the years have asked the question, “how can a show set in New York—one of the most diverse cities in the world—have absolutely no Black people?” And to that, the answer is simple—in the world that Dunham designs, this very white, very uniformed world that she sketches with her pen, Black people are simply not a part of her characters’ social reality. While this is not necessarily a bad thing—particularly because you technically don’t have to be friends with people from other races—it got me thinking about Oberlin.
I was shoveling Cheez-Its in my mouth at Sam and Nimala’s dining table the other day, when the conversation turned toward the intersection between race and social life here. I cannot remember how exactly we got there, but I do remember saying something along the lines of, “everyone is woke until it's time to have Black friends.” This is the very idea that I want to interrogate this week. The truth is, in as much as we complain (and we should continue to do so), we do go to a moderately diverse school—at least in relation to other elite liberal arts colleges. A quick google search places us squarely in the middle of the pack. Is that great? Fuck no. Is it serviceable? Sure. Yet, a cursory glance at campus will show you just how racially segregated social circles are. And I’m not fucking around when I say this—it is incredibly clear. Blinding even.
I was scrolling through YikYak two weeks ago (please, please, please forget I said this, I’m on there for anthropological reasons, I swear), and I came across a post someone made lamenting on how segregated campus is. And while I’d had this thought before, this one post seemed to vindicate me. The more attention I began paying, the more explicit it became.
This “segregation” is definitely not on purpose, or at least I like to think it’s not. The truth is that one’s distinct social background, whether it be their race, their class, or their gender, will play an immutable role in whoever it is that they choose to engage with. That’s just being human. To mandate that everyone have a racially-diverse friend group is, I think, pretty fucking stupid.
Yet, the question remains: how “woke” can you really be if you have no Black friends (or friends of color at all)? To be “woke,” really “woke,” is to care deeply about the world and the people who inhabit it. It is to—as I wrote in one of my articles last semester—“rebel against conservative systems which seek to stifle any forms of difference.” How can one rebel against these systems if one knows nothing about the people they seek to marginalize? You cannot be anti-racist without having thoughtful, mutually-beneficial relationships with people of different races. This is especially why I use the word “friend” here. I do not mean acquaintance, I do not mean colleague or classmate, nor do I mean the people you throw half-hearted waves to on your walk to class. I mean friend—someone you enjoy talking to, someone you enjoy spending time with, someone you learn from and who learns from you. Someone who has burrowed their way into your heart and has made a home there. Someone who you look upon with love.
I wonder how many white people on this campus can lay claim to such relationships. And I say this not to talk shit (my most favorite activity), or to stoke some sort of race war (the ones constantly occuring on YikYak), but sincerely because I believe that progressive politics cannot be divorced from real fucking life. We CANNOT, I repeat, CANNOT be progressive, or woke, or passionate about crafting a kinder world, if we do not engage with one another past the spectre of identity. I’ve spoken extensively about how, here at Oberlin, my Blackness seems to speak before I do. It is ever present in almost every interaction that I have with non-Black people (who are not my friends). It is underlying of course, never loud or oppressive. In truth, this feeling has become so commonplace that I barely notice it—unsurprisingly, when you’re the only Black person in a room numerous times over four years, you tend to care less and less about that fact. But it is all there all the same. If we are to progress as a community, we must get over that hump; we must begin to view people of color as people and not as teachers, or subjects, or case-studies.
In one of my Africana Studies classes, a professor of mine mentioned that they're suspicious of people who have no Black friends. While, again, I do not think that it is inherently wrong to have a homogenous social circle, I guess a part of me is suspicious as well. It’s why I wholeheartedly disagree with the critique of Girls’ racial dynamics. Hannah and her friends are not bad people because they have no Black friends. Far from it. But the fact that they don’t does show me the type of people they are. I think Dunham conveys this characterization expertly. By placing these characters in a social reality whereby all people of color remain afterthoughts, we learn so much more about them than any line of expository dialogue could provide.
Many of my dearest friends at Oberlin are, and have been, white as fuck. And I mean many. I did not make an active effort to befriend them, but I do think we became friends because we understood (and continuously understand) each other as people and not as caricatures—representatives of one race or another. It is important to free yourself from this feeling that your relationships must be a reflection of your background. That’s fucking bullshit. Talk to people. Really, really talk to them. And don’t be fucking weird about it.
All my love,
Leks.
