White women, please be honest about this

[Lightsmother]

I’m a South Asian woman and genuinely feel white women are unable to fully connect with me in the same way they are with other white women. I don’t feel a genuine solidarity or sisterhood coming from them, regardless of how hard I try or attempt to fit in with their norms.

When you meet a non-white woman, do you really see through her race?

From school to university and now parenthood, it’s a difficult experience and I am constantly considering how each meeting and interaction would go if I were white.

My best friend since childhood is of Indian heritage and spent her childhood between England and India so is fairly culturally Indian. But we just clicked as children and are still good friends three decades on. Although I have noticed that since having children she spends more and more time with friends of a similar background to her. Like a lot of people I haven't made many close friendships as an adult but the last one I made was with an Arab American living in London. Again, we just clicked.

More than skin colour I would struggle to form a close friendship with someone very culturally different, particularly if they had a strong faith to a religion which I see as oppressive to women.

Supertree and Xenia hit on very good points. The UK has massive divisions amongst it's indigenous population so in a way what hope in hell do immigrants have? In fact, perhaps social class also trumps colour and culture.

Supertree, your comments hit a spot with me. I am WC, came from nothing, lived overseas and prospered there quite a lot, DC in private schools, live in a posh house. However, I do not fit in with the MC and I no longer fit in with the WC. I am in no group and belong nowhere. One of the reason why I gravitate to non British women (I know I do) is because they have always judged me on my behaviour, rather than my accent and social class.

I agree with the comments about experience. If I look at DD1(26)'s friendships, her deepest friendships are with people who are outliers in some way.

We are white british but spent DD1's primary school years in another european country. DD1 attended the local school, became bi-lingual, her friendship group was very mixed with lots of expats in that group.

Since we moved back to the UK her friendship group is still much more mixed than would be typical of our small predominantly white working class town.

I think it is something to do with that experience which is outside the comprehension of the locally born, locally raised people. Many of whom had barely even left the county until they hit secondary age.

My husband is 'foreign' as in born abroad and has a strong accent even after nearly two decades in the UK, he's found it hard to make friends over the years, ending up gravitating towards other immigrants/people from wider European backgrounds. In fact, we moved to help that as we ended up in a small town that was very white and very closed-in, individual people were fine, but the sense that they saw him first as foreign was very strong. We moved to a larger city and made a lot of friends with wider roots which worked better for us, we didn't feel like the outsiders! It is not just a female/female thing, but class and race issues run through social interactions in the UK and it can take a while to find friends and make deeper friendships for that reason.

I am a white middle-aged female and I have friends from lots of different countries, but mostly they are white which reflects the demographic of my workplace. I do sometimes feel nervous around someone new who is quite different than me- that could be because of skin colour, culture or class, like I feel like I'm going to be judged. It isn't me doing the judging so much as feeling self-conscious about myself. I can't, hand on heart, say it is never an issue though- there needs to be some reason to get over the 'hump' of new person, not sure what they think, it takes me years to truly make a friend.

As other people have mentioned, it is harder to connect with people who don't share something with you, such as cultural norms or hobbies. The idea of a shared sisterhood of white women is a fiction, though. I do feel more empathy with women than men, but that's as far as it goes.

I am white and have grown up in the UK. I have a small number of close friends and a wider circle of less close ones, but don't think I woukd describe having solidarity or sisterhood with anybody within either circle. I'm sad not to have a 'best friend' but fir me I think it's not having found 'the one'. I would only expect to have a relationship as you describe with maybe 1 or 2 very close friends, more than that would be smothering

There are very few white people, Albinoes, I have met a (very) few actually black. I couldnt care less where you were born, the colour of your skin ,best friend is Asian. I have experienced racial prejudice at work several times, but because I am "white", he was black African nothing said or done. I worked for the NHS many many years so proably came across more diversity of people than the average. My bestie, who is a lovelly kind person, was in charge one shift, a Chinese Agency nurse, was happily asleep, friend told her she wasn't being paid to sleep, Agency Nurse went to Manager, said my friend was racially abusing her!!

I am white but not British. I have two dcs who have been born and raised in the U.K.

My experience is

• as non brit, I always feel at odd with people around me. You can talk about culture difference blabla all you like but I’m only coming from across the channel. The difference in culture are small (esp compare to let’s say South Asia like the OP background is)

• my dcs ARE BRITISH however, every single one of their friends is seen them, not as British but as French (my nationality). This is despite the fact they are clearly 80% British bith because of where they have lived all their life and because their dad is english... It goes as far as my MIL saying they are ‘international’ so even SHE doesn’t see them as fully British...

So from my experience, I wouod day that English (because that’s where I live, I could t make the same assumption for scotland, NI etc...) people might say they don’t make a difference but actually they do. It might be very subconsciously but they still do :(

@Lightsmother, because I am white, I wouldn’t dare saying where this feeling of being uncomfortable comes from. If it’s linked to race or having a different cultural background. I just want to reassure you that, despite what people on MN say, it’s not you. It’s not in your head. And yes people DO make a difference and spot all the little details that are ‘not like us’ and sure make you aware about it. (Just like they can spot the details that separate people in different classes, down the tiny details)

There are very few white people, Albinoes, I have met a (very) few actually black.

Is this the latest version of the breath-takingly dim 'I don't care if you're green with purple spots, I'm so race-blind'?

I personally feel self conscious and I worry about offending and making some faux pas that you may be offended by and that you may judge me for. I don't feel truly comfortable even though I may like you a lot.
I feel exactly the same way with my religious JW friend who I really like but I just can't fully connect with.

I’ve thought about this often. I have several friendships with people of different colours/cultures but my friends that I have the closest bonds with are also white and have a similar background/upbringing to me.

I teach in a multicultural primary school and have noticed children naturally gravitate to other children of similar race/culture to their own. There is a boy in my class who was born in Scotland to Ghanaian parents. He was the only child in the class with African heritage and has lots of lovely friendships with other children in the class. However, he was completely beside himself with excitement when another black child joined the class. He was desperate to find out more about her and her home life and immediately wanted to befriend her. I see this sort of pattern often with children, but I’m not sure what the reason for it is. Is there a built in desire to seek friendships with those who look most like ourselves? Or has the message come from home/upbringing? I don’t know.

The old adage, "birds of a feather flock together," is true

Having lived in many different countries, I haven’t that to be true everywhere you go actually. In my experience, the uk is particularly closed up. And is very good at convincing itself ‘it’s normal’ with comments like those.

I'm white and British but find it hard to connect with people of any colour. Superficially I'm bright and cheery and know lots of fellow parents to chat to at park and pick up etc but struggle to form deep friendships. Always been the same even throughout school.

I know its me rather than them. I just wonder if you're not overthinking and then feeling awkward which makes it harder ime?

I teach in a school that is so diverse, there’s about 60 different languages spoken.

One day I decided to let all my classes choose their own partner for the lesson, over 5 lessons every single pair, except one, was that of the same ethnicity/race etc. It tends to be a bit unusual for boy/girls to pair together but even those where one girl was of one race and a boy of the same race, they would pair up.

I asked my year 10s about it... they looked around and agreed and a few said it’s because they feel happiest with someone of the same race/ethnicity.

I personally feel self conscious and I worry about offending and making some faux pas that you may be offended by and that you may judge me for. I don't feel truly comfortable even though I may like you a lot.

This keeps coming up on the thread, accompanied by much hand-wringing, but no one ever clarifies what kind of terrible 'faux pas' you are so terrified of making that it prevents you ever making friends with someone of another ethnicity -- could some of the people who've said this give concrete examples of these horrors they fear they will commit?

I also find that in England, people are regularly stuck between a version of ‘im worried I’m going to offend’ (I mean, why would you offend anyone who has lived their whole life in the uk???) and a version of your are different therefore not like me’ (with the added therefore you will never fit in. This applies to race, class, and even where in the uk you were born - see the north and south divide etc...).

I found how self conscious English people are quite fascinating I have to say.

How you feel is how you feel, OP. It does sound like you have had experiences going back as far as your childhood of being made to feel ‘other’ and I’m pretty sure every single non-white person in the UK will have felt that to some extent.

I’m white, but grew up and still live in a very multicultural area of London. My best childhood friends are from Jamaican, Nigerian and Mauritian Indian backgrounds respectively. My other good friends are French Algerian, Turkish and British born and raised Indian heritage. I have deep and genuine friendships with them and don’t see them as ‘other’ at all, but I’m not colour blind or blind to cultural and religious differences, and I respect that some of their experiences in this country will be very different to mine, as black or brown women, as Muslims etc.

@OngoingOmnishambles

Supertree and Xenia hit on very good points. The UK has massive divisions amongst it's indigenous population so in a way what hope in hell do immigrants have? In fact, perhaps social class also trumps colour and culture.

Supertree, your comments hit a spot with me. I am WC, came from nothing, lived overseas and prospered there quite a lot, DC in private schools, live in a posh house. However, I do not fit in with the MC and I no longer fit in with the WC. I am in no group and belong nowhere. One of the reason why I gravitate to non British women (I know I do) is because they have always judged me on my behaviour, rather than my accent and social class.

This chimes with me. In some places you will just never fit in if you are in any way „different“ from the locals, be that skin colour, accent, views, penchant for reading .... or even the type of coffee you drink at home, or the way you make your salad dressing. Some Brits are deeply, deeply xenophobic, classist (inverse snobbery counts too!) and insular. It’s not as simple as „racism“.

Goatinthegarden - interesting, I also work in a multi-cultural primary school and have not noticed that with friendships at all between the children, though admittedly sometimes with the parents.

Out of interest OP, is the place you live now where you grew up? Is it very ‘local’ (by which I mean mainly populated by people who have never lived anywhere else?

Also are your friends the same ethnicity to you and born in the UK? Do you find it very easy to connect to them?

Also do you drink and enjoy going to the pub (or did so before kids)?

Ive actually often wondered why most of my close friends seem to be white even if theyre foreign, because i certainly dont feel like im prejudiced or biased particularly

Its not dim its a fact, so everything has to be black or white does it, because you are not allowed to mention the word "colour" any more oh or red.

@OverTheRainbow88. I feel very sad at reading that.

Especially because it is so far from my own dcs experience.
For me it reflects more the general culture in the uk that a real association with one’s race. If you feel that each time you interact with someone who is ‘different’ you are judged and othered, no wonder people feel more comfortable with people ‘like them’

Interesting that you dismiss any suggestions that it is anything that you are doing as 'throwing shade'. It doesn't have to mean that there's anything wrong with you, but why not explore the idea that maybe you are doing something that people are backing away from, rather than assuming that it's race-based? It could be something cultural, or maybe just something about the way you go about it, maybe you've ended up a bit defensive because of prior experiences, and that's coming across, making people feel a bit uncomfortable. Or any of a host of other traits that might just be making it harder.

I know that I have lots of things that make it harder for me to make friends; some of them I can work on, others less so. I wish I knew more about what some of them were. You've obviously got better skills that me if you've at least still got friends from school

I suppose, in a situation when meeting lots of strangers, I do tend to gravitate to people with shared cultural background, easier to start talking, find common ground, even just little things to begin chatting about, shared history. Although I don't mean it to, I suspect that probably does mean I subconsciously expect that is more likely to be the case with someone white. I am also from another continent, so it's not really specific details. But when I'm just meeting an individual, then I like discovering who they are and in finding points of commonality and interest, regardless of background.

It might also be to do with expectations of friendship. I haven't made really good friends since university, going through really big life changes with someone (who I still know, though don't see too often). Since then, I've met friends, who I know generally, sometimes do things with, see at activities, etc, but no-one that I'd really get close to in the same way. They have their own childhood/university friends, their families, their work colleagues, etc, and I am on tiny part of that. I might see them once at week at a class or a club. I think for a lot of people, adult friendships are like that. It's a different intensity to how it is at other stages. People need different types of people at different stages. I don't feel a sense of 'sisterhood' or 'connection' or anything, not in a really emotionally intense way like when i was younger. I think it's rare to really make new 'best friends' as an adult. So maybe you are also experiencing the difficulty in making friends that happens at different stages of life, and are attributing it primarily to skin colour, when it might be largely because of other factors.

@QuestionMarkNow

I am white but not British. I have two dcs who have been born and raised in the U.K.

My experience is

• as non brit, I always feel at odd with people around me. You can talk about culture difference blabla all you like but I’m only coming from across the channel. The difference in culture are small (esp compare to let’s say South Asia like the OP background is)

• my dcs ARE BRITISH however, every single one of their friends is seen them, not as British but as French (my nationality). This is despite the fact they are clearly 80% British bith because of where they have lived all their life and because their dad is english... It goes as far as my MIL saying they are ‘international’ so even SHE doesn’t see them as fully British...

So from my experience, I wouod day that English (because that’s where I live, I could t make the same assumption for scotland, NI etc...) people might say they don’t make a difference but actually they do. It might be very subconsciously but they still do :(

@Lightsmother, because I am white, I wouldn’t dare saying where this feeling of being uncomfortable comes from. If it’s linked to race or having a different cultural background. I just want to reassure you that, despite what people on MN say, it’s not you. It’s not in your head. And yes people DO make a difference and spot all the little details that are ‘not like us’ and sure make you aware about it. (Just like they can spot the details that separate people in different classes, down the tiny details)

I have the converse. My children are born in France and have always lived here, but because they are British they are treated as ‘other’ here.

They are definitely more comfortable with their British than their French friends. But I think that’s because their British friends are more international, don’t know how well they’d get along in deepest darkest England.