STARS AND SHADOWS

A searching history of interracial friendship and cooperation throughout American history.

George Washington’s farewell address is “tinged with the presumption of racial homogeneity as a prerequisite of national unity,” writes political science professor Ambar. The U.S. was racially diverse then and is even more so now, and we diverge today along a number of axes—food, religion, customs, ethnicity—that hold us apart. Ambar examines key instances that speak to the ability of people to reach across those lines of separation to form friendships. Although Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, to name one of Ambar’s examples, seem to have genuinely liked each other, there was also a quid pro quo in their relationship. Perhaps the least successful of these case studies involved the efforts of Benjamin Banneker, a freed Black man, to forge a relationship with Thomas Jefferson, which would allow him to argue intellectual equality between races. Banneker, a surveyor who help lay out the plat of Washington, D.C., was unable to sway Jefferson, who replied in letters that he was in principle in favor of “raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be”—ought to be if Blacks were free, that is—but was otherwise reluctant to abandon the White supremacist stance into which he was born. Other friendships were more successful, if still reflective of their time: Ralph Ellison and Shirley Jackson enjoyed a great literary friendship, but it had to be mediated by Jackson’s husband since “You didn’t write to another man’s wife.” Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, all round out the possibilities of racial amity, at least among the cultural and political elite. Closing his illuminating study, Ambar writes, “we cannot disavow friendship’s role in making over our democratic republic.”

A welcome case that all of us should just get along—and work hard to do so.