Friends, teachers, witnesses, healers: Whiteness and cross-race friendship

Race continues to affect people's lives in the United States today. Racial identity, however, is left uninvestigated by most whites. This allows whites to remain unconscious of the impacts racial placement has on their psyche and social relationships. Depth psychology is only recently awakening to this issue.; This study uses a participatory hermeneutic methodology involving individual and pair interviews to investigate the experience of enduring cross-race friendship between whites and people of color who are over 35 years of age. Thematic chapters offer answers to the following questions: what is the lived experience of being in a cross-race friendship? What role does conflict related to issues of race and the perception of whiteness play within the friendships? How do participants see whiteness? How does this perception play a role within the friendship? To what degree do participants move against the cultural norm in choices of employment, housing, and personal relationships? Finally, how do people who confront issues of race extensively still feel challenged by embedded whiteness that erupts from the unconscious?; Findings indicate that depth psychology must investigate links between individuation and racial identity awareness and re-imagine differentiation to include the effects of racial conditioning. Evidence suggests that cross-race friendships can add to whites' and people of color's individuation process. Findings also highlight the link between the numbing effects of splitting and dissociation within our social and psychic realms and our ability to perceive suffering in the world around us. Evidence indicates that there is a relationship between the social and psychic dissociations in terms of race, specifically concerning isolation and emotional restriction associated with whiteness.; Lastly, this investigation considers possibilities for collective healing through the concept of "witnessing" and its requirements of obligation and vigilance. Included is the need to face the history of whiteness and work through what it means to be "white" in the United States today as we develop an "ethic of love" that can broaden our sense of self in relation to the world.