On Threads, I said I don't trust white people who have exactly one Black friend. The internet had some feelings about that.
The pushback I keep getting goes like this: What about somebody who grew up in a town of 2,000 people where there was one Black family? What about the guy who had one Black classmate from kindergarten through senior year, and they are still close?
Fine. He's your friend. Keep him as your friend; I'm not talking about him.
I'm talking about the people who had options.
When the pool is deep, and you still come up with one
I live in Chicago. This city is segregated in ways that have been studied, mapped, and written about for a hundred years, and it is also a city where you would have to actively work at it to know only one of us.
The Red Line. The office. The school pickup line. The gym. The grocery store, the block, the conference, the group project, the neighborhood you moved into because it had character.
Options are not the issue. Availability is not the issue.
So when someone who has spent most of their life in a city like mine and the friendship roster comes back with a single name on it, that's not scarcity. That's a filter. And the filter has preferences it has never said out loud.
What that one friend got selected for
Here is the part that stings, and I mean for it to.
The one usually has a profile. They are the one who does not make anybody work. Who does not correct anybody. Who lets it slide in the group chat, at the barbecue, in the meeting when someone says the thing. Who gets spicy when you ask them to, and sometimes stands as a default mammy.
They have been quietly graded on how little frictioin they create, and they passed.
That is not a friendship. That is a casting decision.
And make no mistake, I'm not blaming that person. Being the one is very often a survival position, and plenty of us have held it in a job, or a school, or a whole neighborhood. You learn to be easy because being easy is what keeps you in the room.
What this costs the one
The one becomes the interpreter. The reference. The receipt
Something happens in the news and they get the text. Somebody says something sideways at dinner and every head turns to them to see if it landed. They are asked to explain a whole people, on demand, in a friendship where no one else has a job.
Then, when it gets convenient, they get cited. My friend in Black and she thought it was funny.
That is the moment the whol arrangement shows itself. That is what the one was for.
Sometimes, the cost is everything
I want to name some people, because this is where we stop being a think piece.
Tamla Horsford. November 2018, Forsyth County, Georgia. She was 40, a mother of five, and the only Black woman at an overnight party with a group of white football moms. She was found dead in the backyard the next morning. The sheriff's office ruled it an accidental fall from a deck and closed the case in February 2019. Her family never accepted it. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation reviewed the case, and in 2021 the district attorney determined the findings did not support criminal charges.
That was eight years ago and a lot of us have never put it down.
Then this year happened.
Daniel Erving. 18, Rowlett, Texas, outside Dallas. Honor roll student, swim team. On April 13 he went out with two white friends and jumped into Lake Ray Hubbard from a bridge. He drowned. His body was recovered four days later, and police ruled it an accidental drowning. Here is the part that is not in dispute, because it is in the arrest affidavit: instead of calling for help, the other two took his clothes and his cell phone, threw them out, and drove away. A 19-year-old and a teenager have been charged with tampering with evidence
Nolan Wells. 18, Ocean Springs, Mississippi. On July 4 he took a boat to Horn Island with a group of friends. He was the only Black one. He did not come back with them. A park ranger found his body in the water two days later. An independent autopsy commissioned by his family listed the cause and manner of death as undetermined pending further investigation. The state autopsy is being held until a grand jury can review it.
Tyler Smith. 18, Lexington, Kentucky, a Lafayette High School graduate. He died in the early hours of July 4 at a gathering on Blue Bonnet Drive. Police called it accidental and self-inflicted. His family says no. According to a Lexington Police citation, the firearm officers recovered did not match the shell casing found at the scene. A 20-year-old has been charged with tampering with physical evidence.
Three Black 18-year-olds, April to July. At the end of July, Ben Crump stood with all three families at the National Urban League conference in Nashville and said the thing everybody could already see: nobody has been held accountable in any of them.
Let me be careful, because I am not a prosecutor and neither are you. As of this writing, no one has been charged in connection with any of these three deaths. What has been charged, twice, is tampering. Somebody moving things. Somebody deleting things. Somebody driving away.
And that is almost the whole point.
The only one is also the only witness
Here is what being the only one means when something goes wrong.
Every account of what happened comes from people who are not you. Every timeline, every version, every "he was fine when we left him" comes from the same group. There is nobody on that boat, at that lake, in that house whose loyalty runs to you and your mother.
Nobody there to say wait, that is not what he would do. He was on the swim team. He knew that water. He was not depressed. He would not have just walked off.
The families are saying those exact things right now. And they are saying them from the outside, after the fact, to departments that had already made up their minds.
That is the risk the one carries that nobody else in the party carries. Not because everybody at the party is dangerous. Because when you are the only one, the story of what happened to you gets told entirely by other people.
Before you tell me this cuts both ways
The other reply I keep getting: you would NEVER say this about a Black person who has one white friend.
Correct. I wouldn't. Here's why that isn't the gotcha you think it is.
The math runs in opposite directions. A Black person with one white friend has been around white people CONSTANTLY. School, work, the bank, the doctor's office, the licensing counter, every customer service interaction of their adult life. Hundreds cam through and one made it. That is not a shortage. That is vetting.
A white person can build an entire life with almost no Black proximity and never once be inconvenienced by it. Their one is not what survived a selection process. Their one is what was left after avoidance.
Same number. Opposite math.
Then there is what the friendship gets used for. "I have a Black friend" is a defense. It comes out when someone needs cover, and it often works because other white people accept it. There is no version of that running the other way. Nobody's job or reputation has ever been saved by producing a white friend. A thing you cannot cash is not a token.
And there is the labor. The Black friend is the interpreter, the reference, the one who getst the text when something is in the news. The white friend is not asked to explain white people at dinner. Nobody at the table turns to look at them. There is no work coming out of that friendship, so there is nothing to resent.
Last, the stakes are not the same size, and everything above this section is why. When the only Black person in the group ends up dead, the account of what happened comes from everybody else, and the people whose job it is to investigate it tend to accept it. When a white person is the one in the Black friend group, the worst case is that they feel a little awkward at the cookout.
Now, here is the part I want you to sit with.
We do side-eye a version of this. Just not the one you named.
It is the person with no Black friends at all. That gets clocked immediately. It gets discussed in the car on the way home, and it has been getting discussed in the car on the way home for generations.
So the suspicion was never attached to the number. In both directions, it is attached to the distance from Black people. That rule has been consistent the entire time.
The only difference is that one group can put that distance there without ever noticing they did it.
What I'm actually asking
I am not asking anybody to go out and collect Black friends like Pokemon. That is its own kind of gross, and we can always tell.
To white folks reading this: look at your filter. Ask why, out of everybody available to you, only one made it through. Ask what that one has in common with you that the others did not. Then ask the harder one. If something happened to that friend while they were with you, who in that room would have been theirs?
To Black parents reading this: you already know. You may have been having some version of this conversation at your kitchen table since July. I am not going to tell you what to do with your children. I am going to tell you that the knot in your stomach when you see your kid as the only one in the group photo is not paranoia, and it is not you being difficult. It's data.
And to whoever is the one right now, in a job, or a school, or a friend group: I am not telling you your friends are dangerous.
I am telling you to notice who would come looking for you.
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