Lecture by Ivy Schweitzer at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender, Difference and Diversity at FAU (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in Erlangen, Germany , June 13, 2022. Image by Faith Ringgold

1. POLITICS AND PAIN OF
WOMEN’S CROSS-
RACIAL FRIENDSHIPS
IVY SCHWEITZER,
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
June 13, 2022: Interdisciplinary Center for
Gender, Difference and Diversity at FAU
(Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-
Nürnberg) in Erlangen, Germany
Faith Ringgold, “American People”

2. ON DERRIDA’S POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
From a recent review in The New Yorker:
“In an era of social media and fluid, proliferating channels of
communication and exchange, the idea of friendship seems almost
quaint, and possibly imperiled.”

3. #GETTINGTOWE :
DEBORAH PLUMMER AND
LORI STEVIC-RUST,
HTTPS://GETTINGTOWE.O
RG/
They use “the principles of behavior … to build social
trust among a coalition of Black and White women
invested in achieving racial equity.”
“
“Women are the keepers of the culture and racism
is in the culture,” so women are uniquely
positioned to make what they call “transformative
cultural change.”

4. I f
‘‘If I had to choose between
betraying my country and
betraying my friend I hope I
should have the guts to
betray my country.’’
—E. M. Forster, Two
Cheers for Democracy

5. ARISTOTLE ON FRIENDSHIP (PHILIA)
“like attracts like”
“equality—and likeness—is friendship, and especially the likeness of
those alike in virtue.”
“a friend is another self” or a “second self” (philos allos autos)
“And so, just as when wishing to behold our own faces we have
seen them by looking upon a mirror, whenever we wish to know our
own characters and personalities, we can recognize them by looking
upon a friend.” — Magna Moralia

6. EQUALITY AND
DIFFERENCES
Diana Fuss: : “To be ‘like’ the other is to be different from the other, to be
precisely not the same.” “Politics,” she concludes, “thus emerges not out
of sameness but out of the non-coincidence between self and other that
gives rise to a desire for an illusory sameness.”
Me: If friendship is to be a useful tool for feminist practice, we need to
redefine equality not as sameness but as a utopian horizon of parity, an
evolving equity that rests fluidly on the paradox of embracing and
ignoring of differences.

7. EPICURUS
(341–270
BCE) ON
PHILOXENI
A (GUEST
OR
STRANGER
FRIENDSHI
P)
Derrida, Of Hospitality (1998): “the trope of
friendship as the most comprehensive
philosophical signifier for all those invisible
affective gestures that refuse alignment
along the secure axes of filiation to seek
expression outside, if not against, possessive
communities of belonging.”
Leela Gandhi: “Friendship is one name for
the co-belonging of nonidentical singularities
… a metaphor for dissident crosscultural
collaboration”
Elora Chowdhury and Liz Philipose edit
Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism
and Transnational Solidarity (2016): “Are
‘dissident friendships’ between women enough to
start the work of dismantling systems of power?”

8. LEELA
GANDHI
ON “THE
STAKES”
OF
PHILOXE
NIA
Poised in a relation where an irreducible
and asymmetrical other always calls her
being into question, [the friend] is ever
willing to risk becoming strange or guestlike
in her own domain, whether this be home,
nation, community, race, gender, sex, skin,
or species. So too, the open house of
hospitality or the open heart of friendship
can never know guestsfriends in advance, as
one might a fellow citizen, sister, or
comrade. Such sociality might take the
political form of Judith Butler’s coalition,
“an emerging and unpredictable assemblage
of positions.” Or it might arrive in the form
of Donna Haraway’s fabulist cyborg
community, “permanently partial . . .
monstrous and illegitimate.” Always
unfinished, yet-to-come

9. AUDRE LORDE AND
ADRIENNE RICH, 1980
“But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the
self in work and struggle together with those
whom we define as different from ourselves,
although sharing the same goals.”
—“Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider
“It is the women who make life endurable for
each other, give physical affection without
causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each
other,”
—“Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence”
Michel Foucault: “an experiment in an antirelational
ethics that points towards a politics beyond identity.”

10. PLURALIST
FRIENDSHIP
María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman,
“Have we got a Theory for you! Feminist
Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the
Demand for ‘the Woman’s Voice,’” 1983
María Lugones and Pat Alake Rosezelle,
“Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist
Models,” 1992

11. AMINATOU SOW AND ANN FRIEDMAN, BIG
FRIENDSHIP : HOW WE KEEP EACH
OTHER CLOSE 2020, AND PODCAST: “CALL
YOUR GIRLFRIEND”
“a very old idea that still manages to
feel fresh and inspiring. Greek
philosophers were obsessed with
friendship as an essential virtue and
pillar of the good life. There is, they
argued, no pleasure, fulfillment, or
meaning without friendship.”

12. “THE TRAPDOOR”
Wesley Morris: “For people of color, some aspect of friendship with white people
involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at
any moment, by a slip of the tongue” or other seemingly trivial racist “oops.”
Pat Parker: “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend:” “The
first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black. / Second, you must never forget that i’m
Black.”
Nicole Froio and Constanza Marambio: “dissident friendships are about this intimate
breaking of realities, where complicity and/or oppression are discovered through
friendships that make us better feminists and enactors of social justice.”

13. KILEY REID, SUCH A FUN AGE (2019)
Emira Tucker, babysitter for Briar, African American
Alix Chamberlain, affluent white influencer, married to Peter, a TV newscaster, mother of 5 year
old Briar
Kelly, white man, high school boyfriend of Alix, dating Emira, filmed the episode in the market
“Alix fantasized about Emira discovering things about her that shaped what Alix saw as the truest
version of herself. Like the fact that one of Alix’s closest friends was also black. That Alix’s new
and favorite shoes were from Payless, and only cost eighteen dollars. That Alix had read
everything that Toni Morrison had ever written. And that out of her group of friends, Alix and
Peter actually had the smallest salaries …”
“Some days [Emira] carried the sweet relief that Briar would learn to become a self-sufficient
person. And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself,
she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.”

14. CHRISTINE PRIDE AND JO
PIAZZA, WE ARE NOT LIKE
THEM (2021)
Riley Wilson, successful, ambitious TV newscaster, single, Black
Jen, white homemaker, married to Kevin, a police officer in
Philadelphia involved in shooting a Black teenager, Justin Dwyer
Tamara Dwyer, mother of Justin
For Jen, Kevin becomes “an example of someone who accepts the
consequences, who breaks the silence. More people need to. I get
that now. Maybe it’ll make a difference. Maybe it’s some small silver
lining.”
About the letter Kevin writes to Tamara Dwyer, Riley says, “It’s nice,”
but thinks to herself, it’s “completely inadequate and maybe even a
little selfish. He wants to unload his burden, but that’s impossible.”