“Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk to you right now. Even though I know you’re okay, I also can’t help but feel that you are intimately intertwined with my oppressors.” There was a pause over the phone line as my best friend of over 25 years digested my words. I mean, really, where does a conversation go from there?

Michelle and I were college roommates at Stanford. For two years we shared a dorm room, and the late night confessions that frequently accompany that type of proximity. We shared college vacations to Jamaica and, years later, joint family vacations to Hawaii. We were bridesmaids in each other’s weddings and named one another godmothers to our children. We know each other’s extended family members and family stories. In short, I invited Michelle to the “cookout” a long time ago, and she had pulled up a chair and comfortably enjoyed the potato salad.

But we live in a time when black bodies continue to pile up at the hands of cops and racist vigilantes, and white America continues to ignore or justify these murders. Processing these painful events, I was jarringly reminded that Michelle, for all of her wonderful qualities, was still just another white person. Even worse, she was a white person who hailed from the most rural parts of Montana — with family members who I know supported Trump, and a younger sister who (Michelle had recently confessed to me) was flirting with the alt-right movement. In Michelle’s defense, she was dismayed by those facts, but her dismay didn’t make these facts any less true or me any less disgusted.

What followed was a conversation — certainly not our first — about race and friendship and family and politics and how these things intertwine and sometimes painfully knock into each other. She didn’t get defensive. She didn’t attempt to derail or deflect the conversation. She didn’t #NotAllWhitePeople me. She didn’t employ white tears or center her own feelings over mine. She simply listened to my pain and my anger, and she tried to understand things that were not her lived experiences or reality. And she reassured me about where she stood on these issues and about her commitment to trying to fix her family members who didn’t get it.

In short, her response reminded me why we had been able to maintain our unlikely friendship for so many decades. In fact, when she reminded me of how she was trying to be an ally, she used my own words, showing that she’d understood the work I had repeatedly insisted was necessary. She was trying, in her way, to “get her people,” since she knew that it wasn’t the responsibility of black folks to fix problematic or racist whites.

I walked away from that conversation feeling slightly better for having gotten my feelings off my chest and somewhat reassured by her response. However, I was still not completely at peace.

The reality is that it’s difficult to maintain a relationship with a person who breaks bread with your enemies, someone who loves people that you can’t, who sees shades of gray where you can only see a clearly delineated black and white, right and wrong.

In large part, Michelle and I were able to have that discussion and walk away with our friendship intact precisely because we had over 25 years of trust already established. I know Michelle in a way that it takes over 25 years to know someone. I know her heart. And after more than 25 years of friendship, Michelle knows me well enough to understand the necessity of my righteous anger and militant approach to racial issues. She knows that although this approach might be off-putting to some, I need in order to process the real and painful emotions that naturally arise from the experiences I am witnessing and living through. In many ways, anger has become the core of my coping and survival techniques. As Audre Lorde wrote in her book of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider: “My response to racism is anger. . . It has served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for fear or guilt. . . My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.”

By Fibonacci Blue.

I confess, I’m only willing to hash through these painful emotions and confusing thoughts with Michelle because of our long-standing prior relationship, established when I was far less cynical and aware of life’s realities. Frankly, at 45, I don’t have the energy or the optimism that I had at 18 to sort through the wheat and the chaff of white people.

I am battered from far too many microaggressions from well-meaning, but clueless, “allies.” I am scarred from the searing pains of betrayal by people who, for years, I welcomed into my home, shared laughs with, and thought respected my humanity — who then showed me their true colors in November by voting for a racist like Donald Trump. I am tired of the silence of white friends who fail to notice or acknowledge that my world is falling apart (once again), as another black person is murdered by another cop who somehow never gets held accountable. I am frustrated with friends who never “like” or share my posts on racial inequities and injustices or police brutality, nervously averting their eyes, only to re-engage with me when I post carefree selfies or fun pictures of my kids.

Political discussions are no longer “just a debate,” and I am no longer willing to entertain devil’s-advocate arguments on issues that are fundamentally related to my survival. I can no longer agree to disagree with people whose disagreement is, as James Baldwin noted, “rooted in my oppression.”

So in a nation where black and white have tangible implications, I will continue to struggle through the sharp and sometimes painful realities of my relationship with Michelle… But I am not willing to open the door to any new white applicants. And, honestly, I don’t know when, if ever, I will be.

*This is the collective product of women of color and allies, and this piece specifically comes from an African American voice.