So the original piece is written by
Ekow N. Yankah, a professor who teaches
criminal law at Yeshiva University's
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

The response (and gross misinterpretation)
piece is by white columnist, Stu Bykofsky.

I'm really interested in how OKP feels about
the response considering what the piece
*actually* says. Do share.

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Original piece (SWIPE)
Can My Children Be Friends With White People?
By EKOW N. YANKAHNOV. 11, 2017

My oldest son, wrestling with a 4-year-old’s happy struggles, is trying to clarify how many people can be his best friend. “My best friends are you and Mama and my brother and …” But even a child’s joy is not immune to this ominous political period. This summer’s images of violence in Charlottesville, Va., prompted an array of questions. “Some people hate others because they are different,” I offer, lamely. A childish but distinct panic enters his voice. “But I’m not different.”

It is impossible to convey the mixture of heartbreak and fear I feel for him. Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people.

Meaningful friendship is not just a feeling. It is not simply being able to share a beer. Real friendship is impossible without the ability to trust others, without knowing that your well-being is important to them. The desire to create, maintain or wield power over others destroys the possibility of friendship. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dream of black and white children holding hands was a dream precisely because he realized that in Alabama, conditions of dominance made real friendship between white and black people impossible.

History has provided little reason for people of color to trust white people in this way, and these recent months have put in the starkest relief the contempt with which the country measures the value of racial minorities. America is transfixed on the opioid epidemic among white Americans (who often get hooked after being overprescribed painkillers — while studies show that doctors underprescribe pain medication for African-Americans). But when black lives were struck by addiction, we cordoned off minority communities with the police and threw away an entire generation of black and Hispanic men.

Likewise, despite centuries of exclusion and robust evidence of continuing racism, minority underemployment is often couched in the language of bad choices and personal responsibility. When systemic joblessness strikes swaths of white America, we get an entire presidential campaign centered on globalization’s impact on the white working class. Even the nerve of some rich or visible African-Americans to protest that America, in its laws and in its police, has rarely been just to all has been met with the howls of a president who cannot tolerate that the lucky and the uppity do not stay in their place.

As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.

Let me assure you that my heartbreak dwarfs my anger. I grew up in a classic Midwestern college town. With all its American faults, it was a diverse and happy-childhood kind of place, slightly dull in the way that parents wish for their children. If race showed in class lines, school cliques and being pulled over more often, our little Americana lacked the deep racial tension and mistrust that seem so hard to escape now.

What’s surprising is that I am heartbroken at all. It is only for African-Americans who grew up in such a place that watching Mr. Trump is so disorienting. For many weary minorities, the ridiculous thing was thinking friendship was possible in the first place. It hurts only if you believed friendship could bridge the racial gorge.

Of course, the rise of this president has broken bonds on all sides. But for people of color the stakes are different. Imagining we can now be friends across this political line is asking us to ignore our safety and that of our children, to abandon personal regard and self-worth. Only white people can cordon off Mr. Trump’s political meaning, ignore the “unpleasantness” from a position of safety. His election and the year that has followed have fixed the awful thought in my mind too familiar to black Americans: “You can’t trust these people.”

It is not Mr. Trump himself who has done this. Were it not for our reverence for money, Mr. Trump would be easily recognized as the simple-minded, vulgar, bigoted blowhard he is. It is certainly not the neo-Nazis marching on Charlottesville; we have seen their type before. Rather, what has truly broken my heart are the ranks of Mr. Trump’s many allies and apologists.

Mr. Trump’s supporters are practiced at purposeful blindness. That his political life started with denying, without evidence, that Barack Obama is American — that this black man could truly be the legitimate president — is simply ignored. So, too, is his history of housing discrimination, his casual conflation of Muslims with terrorists, his reducing Mexican-Americans to murderers and rapists. All along, his allies have watched racial pornography, describing black America as pathological. Yet they deny that there is any malice whatsoever in his words and actions. And they dismiss any attempt to recognize the danger of his wide-ranging animus as political correctness.

But the deepest rift is with the apologists, the “good” Trump voters, the white people who understand that Mr. Trump says “unfortunate” things but support him because they like what he says on jobs and taxes. They bristle at the accusation that they supported racism, insisting they had to ignore Mr. Trump’s ugliness. Relying on everyday decency as a shield, they are befuddled at the chill that now separates them from black people in their offices and social circles. They protest: Have they ever said anything racist? Don’t they shovel the sidewalk of the new black neighbors? Surely, they say, politics — a single vote — does not mean we can’t be friends.

I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.

The same is true, unfortunately, of those who hold no quarter for Mr. Trump but insist that black people need to do the reaching out, the moderating, the accommodating. Imagine the white friend during the civil rights era who disliked blacks’ being beaten to death but wished the whole thing would just settle down. However likable, you could not properly describe her as a friend. Sometimes politics makes demands on the soul.

Don’t misunderstand: White Trump supporters and people of color can like one another. But real friendship? Mr. Trump’s bruised ego invents outrageous claims of voter fraud, not caring that this rhetoric was built upon dogs and water hoses set on black children and even today the relentless effort to silence black voices. His macho talk about “law and order” does not keep communities safe and threatens the very bodies of the little boys I love. No amount of shoveled snow makes it all right, and too many imagine they can have it both ways. It is this desperation to reap the rewards of white power without being so much as indicted that James Baldwin recognized as America’s criminal innocence.

For African-Americans, race has become a proxy not just for politics but also for decency. White faces are swept together, ominous anxiety behind every chance encounter at the airport or smiling white cashier. If they are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me.

Barack Obama’s farewell address encouraged us to reach across partisan lines. But there is a difference between disagreeing over taxes and negotiating one’s place in America, the bodies of your children, your humanity. Our racial wound has undone love and families, and ignoring the depths of the gash will not cause it to heal.

We can still all pretend we are friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility — sharing drinks and watching the game. Indeed, even in Donald Trump’s America, I have not given up on being friends with all white people. My bi-ethnic wife, my most trusted friend, understands she is seen as a white woman, even though her brother and father are not. Among my dearest friends, the wedding party and children’s godparents variety, many are white. But these are the friends who have marched in protest, rushed to airports to protest the president’s travel ban, people who have shared the risks required by strength and decency.

There is hope, though. Implicitly, without meaning to, Mr. Trump asks us if this is the best we can do. It falls to us to do better. We cannot agree on our politics, but we can declare that we stand beside one another against cheap attack and devaluation; that we live together and not simply beside one another. In the coming years, when my boys ask again their questions about who can be their best friend, I pray for a more hopeful answer.
(End Swipe)

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And now, here's the (very white) response:
(SWIPE)
Can whites be trusted? Black law prof says no | Stu Bykofsky
Updated: NOVEMBER 14, 2017 — 6:03 PM EST

by Stu Bykofsky, STAFF COLUMNIST @StuBykofsky | stubyko@phillynews.com
Ekow N. Yankah says his black children and my white children maybe can’t be friends because white people don’t carry the trust card.

Yankah, a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, dug a bitter racial moat in a New York Times op-ed essay that put a provocative idea into play: Don’t trust white people.

The essential sentiment of “Can My Children Be Friends With White People?” is this: “Real friendship is impossible without the ability to trust others, without knowing that your well-being is important to them.”

The golden thread that runs through Yankah’s essay is Donald Trump, and the (mostly white) people who support him. Yankah uses that as justification for not trusting white people, but doesn’t acknowledge that Trump’s acolytes amount to maybe one-third of the American people. From that minority, he conjures a distrust of the majority.

Yankah’s disturbing pessimism is surprising, given what he describes as a “diverse and happy childhood” in a Midwestern college town, free of serious racial trauma.

Admittedly, racial relations are worse now than in recent years — and it was getting worse before Trump.

Those who hoped — as I did — that the election of an African American president would be a racial salve were proven wrong.

Although Yankah’s headline was attention-grabbing, a close reading of the essay shows him wavering back and forth across the line of possible friendship.

He writes that he has white friends, and that “even in Donald Trump’s America I have not given up on being friends with all white people.”

But they are not your friends “if you are in danger and they disappear,” Yankah told me in an interview Tuesday. “Racial friendships are difficult.”

Whites have a history of being unfair, he writes, and if Yankah teaches his children that white people enslaved their ancestors, that is truth. But as a matter of intellectual honesty he also should say that white people ended slavery at the cost of almost 400,000 Union lives.

In the civil rights era of the early 1960s, white people named Viola Liuzzo and Andrew Goodman and Michael Shwerner — and others — died trying to help black people achieve equality.

Heather Heyer, a white woman, was killed by auto in Charlottesville while battling white nationalists in August.

Yankah knows all this, yet he writes as if white people are a monolith wholeheartedly devoted to Trump.

On the left side of the political spectrum is found a spreading stain that seeks to race-shame white people. In the caution to his children, Yankah has endorsed that.

“I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible,” Yankah writes. There is nothing especially new about this, he told me. African American children “were always taught to be wary around white people.”

My kids — who had black friends when they were growing up because we chose to buy a home in an integrated neighborhood — were not taught to be wary, but they didn’t grow up with the weight of racism on their backs.

Nor with parents telling them to be cautious of people because of the color of their skin.
(End Swipe)

black man: cant trust em
white man: you're teaching your kids racism by telling them to not trust us *trollface*

yanno.

I only have so much, once I go on E, a mixture of apathy and anger bubble up

im good

That's enough ?

is laughable.

I don't have any white friends at the moment but I don't give a shit how they vote.

Just be cool in my presence and don't let me find out you saying nigger when I'm not around.

and they voted for David Duke, you wouldn't care ?

I did have a good friend in Philly who voted for W.

We debated endlessly but we connected over music, late night shenanigans, and shit talking.

ionno, I just think this whole "only people who are like minded" bubble is kinda weird.

maybe I'm off but it feels like this country is super fucked up because folks put politics over everything these days.

Yea the like-minded sycophant friendship scenario is mad wack..

How can anyone become empathetic to any other ideas and people pther than their own if they dont have friends and or become a part of those peoples lives..

Unless its tomi lahren.. she clearly dont wanna learn

>How can anyone become empathetic to any other ideas and people
>pther than their own if they dont have friends and or become a
>part of those peoples lives..

If THAT'S your goal in being friends with
white folks, that's about as "sycophantic"
as only dealing with like-minded people...
not to mention it usually doesn't work on
racists anyway. You just become "the good
one."

but the whole "they gotta vote like I vote and see shit my way or I'm out" is weird as shit to me.

They don't have to shadow me or be a yes man but if they can pull the lever for Trump, W, HW, Reagan then it sounds like they don't give a damn about they black friends.

about them.

I ain't bending over backwards and I don't expect anyone to do the same.

I talk mad shit about white folk. MAD SHIT!!!!!

so who the fuck am I to be all "these white people I know better love me 3 times as much as I love them"

as much as a debate on here and talk politics I really don't give a shit how a person leans in my day to day dealings. Treat me with respect and I will do the same. what you do on your time ain't my business until I find out.

I just don't have the energy to run behind white folk who I'm cool with (so few.. so, so few..like 2.5 real ass white friends to be honest) and make sure they vote the same way I do.

>about them.
>
>I ain't bending over backwards and I don't expect anyone to do
>the same.
>

Sounds like you are talking about associates or something less than friends.

>I talk mad shit about white folk. MAD SHIT!!!!!
>
>so who the fuck am I to be all "these white people I know
>better love me 3 times as much as I love them"
>

I don't need my friends to love me 3 times over but I don't want to look over my shoulder either. If I can't trust them they are not a friend. That's just someone I know.

>as much as a debate on here and talk politics I really don't
>give a shit how a person leans in my day to day dealings.
>Treat me with respect and I will do the same. what you do on
>your time ain't my business until I find out.
>

If they day to day dealings is suspect then I doubt you will get respect from them.

>I just don't have the energy to run behind white folk who I'm
>cool with (so few.. so, so few..like 2.5 real ass white
>friends to be honest) and make sure they vote the same way I
>do.
>
>
>
>

It really shouldn't be that hard if they are friends. It's simple as hey white friend did you vote for that garbage and they will say yes or no.

>ionno, I just think this whole "only people who are like
>minded" bubble is kinda weird.


There are things that weigh differently.
For instance, many people wouldn't be cool
with someone who is a known pedophile, b/c
they consider that something very important.
Others won't be friends with racists or ppl
who don't stand up for them... likewise, because
they consider that important. It really just
boils down to how important you think it is
to challenge racism.


>maybe I'm off but it feels like this country is super fucked
>up because folks put politics over everything these days.


Interesting statement. I won't get too deep
into this, but I'll just say politics is kinda
"over everything" whether we place it there in
our minds or not.

>>ionno, I just think this whole "only people who are like
>>minded" bubble is kinda weird.
>
>
>There are things that weigh differently.
>For instance, many people wouldn't be cool
>with someone who is a known pedophile, b/c
>they consider that something very important.
>Others won't be friends with racists or ppl
>who don't stand up for them... likewise, because
>they consider that important. It really just
>boils down to how important you think it is
>to challenge racism.
>


^^^^^^^ BAM that right there

>>maybe I'm off but it feels like this country is super fucked
>>up because folks put politics over everything these days.
>
>
>Interesting statement. I won't get too deep
>into this, but I'll just say politics is kinda
>"over everything" whether we place it there in
>our minds or not.
>
>
>

^^^^^^ This

What would be enough?

They gotta be down 150 percent. Educating friends and family, don't make excuses for racism or try to justify it. They are the front line.

yep checks out
had a good friend take my wife to the senate to speak to a couple of senators about how the tax reform effects different parts of the inner city

is that front line enough?

>yep checks out
>had a good friend take my wife to the senate to speak to a
>couple of senators about how the tax reform effects different
>parts of the inner city
>
>is that front line enough?

It's a start.

with such detail.

ill be so much more detailed
especially in interactions on this message board with you
appreciate your service

I agree with the points he made. That rebuttal is ridiculous.

>I agree with the points he made. That rebuttal is ridiculous.

Right. The fact that the rebuttal tries
to pretend that Yankah didn't address the
past is the part that really stands out to me.
The whole "he acts like it's all about Trump"
lie is pretty disgusting... b/c he didn't.

>
>Right. The fact that the rebuttal tries
>to pretend that Yankah didn't address the
>past is the part that really stands out to me.
>The whole "he acts like it's all about Trump"
>lie is pretty disgusting... b/c he didn't.

He's cherry picking.

He wants to believe that our caution (resulting from centuries of abuse and mistreatment) is the same as regular old racism.

He's going off the assumption that blacks & whites are operating from the same starting point.

He's clueless.

and non-Black folks alike.

In this case it's very much a conscious tactic,
because like I was saying to Lurkmode, Yankah
actually talks about the past in his piece.
Bykofsky responds and claims he didn't...
because he doesn't want to face the fact
that Yankah has a point.

but, blacks kill blacks too. I like how he kept harping on Trump and how his supporters are a minority of the white race and it isn't a monolith...as if blacks don't have ANY more from which to draw from in regards to racism.

>but, blacks kill blacks too. I like how he kept harping on
>Trump and how his supporters are a minority of the white race
>and it isn't a monolith...as if blacks don't have ANY more
>from which to draw from in regards to racism.

lol right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTvw8RB3CE

This is... entertaining

ultimately the proferssor was speaking on power dynamics but Tucker just. could. not. get. past. the. race. shit.

saw fox news and closed before the first sentence ended.

not today satan.

...in one of the most bike-friendly big cities in the country. He argues against them because *HE* doesn't like them, doesn't ride them and they annoy him because the get around faster and park more easily than his car. I bring this up because this is a classic, set-in-his-ways old guy that *will not* ever get it.

I think the reason why *those people think this is racism and wont be able to get into his message has to do with feeling as if their own morality is on the line

"I'm a good person goddamnit! I would never do that and I'm not racist, and another thing, blah blah blah, blah blah blah...."