Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships

Emily Bernard examines the complexities of interracial friendships -- white and black, Latino and white, black and Asian, black and Jewish -- in this poignant book that includes essays from Pam Houston, Darryl Pinckney, Luis Rodriguez, and Susan Straight, among others. Meet a young Italian American heading off to college, the first in his family to do so -- where he rooms with and befriends a sophisticated young black man from a highly educated, socially prominent Washington, D.C., family. Meet a second-generation Korean American "from the 'hood" who is more comfortable with Latinos and blacks than with Korean kids who grew up in the suburbs, and compares his friendships to bi-bam-bap, a Korean dish of "all different vegetables, meats, rice, hot sauce mixed in together like crazy." Meet a black man who reflects on a twenty-year friendship with a Jewish man he met in school and with whom he can talk about absolutely everything, except perhaps the politics of the Middle East. A book that celebrates interracial friendships as it examines them, Some of My Best Friends is a timely look at a subject that has yet to be fully explored.