Why the Historian Behind the ‘I Have a Black Friend’ Essay Wants to Reach People Beyond His Classroom

California State U. at Fullerton

It’s tough to create the perfect lunch-break read. Ideally, the article takes less than 30 minutes to read, and you don’t have to be an academic to understand it. Maybe it’s thought-provoking enough that you can’t concentrate on eating. Then you send it to a friend.

It’s even harder to craft a just-right lunch-break read that explains when the phrase “I have a black friend” began as a way for people accused of racism to excuse themselves. The phrase dates back to the days of American slavery, according to the essay “A Brief History of the ‘Black Friend,’” by Tyler D. Parry, associate professor of African-American studies at California State University at Fullerton. The essay appears in Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual Society

Writing an illuminating short read that explains racism, history, and culture isn’t easy, Parry said. It takes work to explain hundreds of years of history in a few hundred words. But that work benefits the world outside a college classroom, and it should be rewarded in the tenure process, Parry said.

The Chronicle spoke with Parry about the essay and how professors can practice more public scholarship. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me why you wrote this essay.

I’m pretty much a monthly contributor to Black Perspectives. I teach a class here at the university called “Race and Relationships,” which explores the interactions between different racial and ethnic groups, whether it be dating, friendship, or political relationships. I didn’t find much on the internet as far as historical examples of this phenomenon. I kept seeing different news stories about white people who were getting in trouble for doing or saying or showing something racist. The first impulse they had was, “Well, I have black friends. I didn’t mean it that way.”

I wrote a piece about the Plantation Myth in Confederate memories, which is basically about former plantation slave-owners, men or women who lovingly recollect their times during slavery and the interactions they had with their enslaved people. And I started to wonder if they ever use the term “friend.” I went back to some of the sources, and in one that’s referenced to a George Fitzhugh, he states that the enslaved people are their friends. I was kind of floored. The idea that they used the term “friend” while participating in an overtly racist system was the historical example that I needed to drive the point home.

What reaction has the essay received?

Even people who are in agreement that this is a problem appreciated that there is an actual history to it, because it’s something we assume you know is patronizing, and it’s wrong. And it keeps happening. But it wasn’t entirely clear where it stemmed from. I was trying to find an origin point, which is what historians try to do. You can reach back to slavery and slave-owners using the exact same language as an excuse for why they are continuously subordinating, holding people of African descent in bondage.

Now that you have pinpointed the phrase historically, where do public scholars go from here?

We continue to use these outlets like Black Perspectives to publicize our research, in a form that is readable by the general public. This particular short essay is effective for these discussions and possibly for inspiring other research. If this sparked interest among public intellectuals or other academics, that would be a victory for me. Even though I’ve started writing more for public audiences, peer review remains the gold standard. I like the process of my ideas being challenged, but for the sake of educating a much larger audience, disseminating short pieces that are free to the general public is going to be incredibly effective.

Is it more important, especially with topics having to do with race, for public intellectuals to write simple essays like this than to do scholarly studies?

I’ve advocated publicly that the tenure process should integrate this type of work. Even when I was going through tenure here, and this is a teaching university, stuff like this was appreciated, but it was never clear to me that it counted realistically toward anything. With the way society has changed through social media, and the access people now have to different forms of media, historians and other scholars need to find a way to ensure that, without sacrificing the peer-review process, they could be able to disseminate short pieces for a general public. One great comment on Twitter said “this should be your lunch-break read.” That’s exactly what I’m going for. I’ve also published 30-plus-page, single-spaced, peer-reviewed research that takes a long time to digest. This essay very bluntly lays out where this particular term comes from and shows the way evidence develops throughout hundreds of years of history.

It’s a particular talent in writing to be able to contain 200-some odd years of history within 1,500 words. Scholars who are able to effectively do that should be rewarded by their institutions in some way in the tenure process. Not that we should do away with peer review, but when people who are engaged in this type of work have a few thousand followers on Twitter, that means something. It shows that people are reading and engaging with you on a much wider scale.

I teach a lot of students, over hundreds of people every semester. I also want to reach a much broader public because we do have to contest against things that are essentially falsehoods.

Do you think scholars and professors have a responsibility, a call to action, to educate people outside their classrooms?

I’d never tell anyone what they should do with their time. But if you have an idea and you’re struggling with writing something long, then use that idea to send to an online venue. The time commitment I have to Black Perspectives is usually a few days. The return is pretty large, as far as the number of readers. If you’re a person who enjoys scholarship, who enjoys the writing process, it does serve you well to to get your stuff out there, because it only benefits society. There’s a certain hesitancy that one has with getting too involved in the public, especially if you’re a person of color. It can be a dangerous and intimidating process. But for me, since I’m writing stuff that is historical, I’m less concerned with people accusing me of lying because everything is cited. It’s a little bit easier, maybe, for a historian to write this because we have to use empirical evidence to prove a point.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is breaking-news editor. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.