‘Letting It Slide’ and ‘Dropping’ Friends: Black Girls in Scotland Navigating Everyday Racism in Friendship

Abstract

Friendship relations and interactions are not commonly perceived as being influenced by structural power relations. This article contests this assumption by examining how everyday racism is entangled within friendships. The article is based on a 15-month ethnographic study with Black girls in Scotland. I conceptualise four different strategies participants utilised to contend with racism directed towards them by their friends: challenging friends, quiet self-preservation, ending the friendship and ‘thinning’ the friendship. I analyse the contexts that informed these friendship strategies, including discourses on racism, white-dominated schools and socio-cultural friendship norms. I argue that friendship is not always egalitarian nor fully voluntary, it is sometimes formed – and endured – out of necessity. This article contributes to the sociology of friendship by illuminating the negative aspects of friendships that are formed across social differences and interrogating how oppression permeates, is reproduced and is resisted in intimate relationships.

Keywords

Black girls everyday racism friendship oppression school Scotland structural power relations

Introduction

Friendship is largely conceived, commonly and in research, as a highly positive, chosen and egalitarian relationship; one that does not require effort, and that should be swiftly ended when it ceases to be satisfactory (Allan, 2003; Giddens, 1991). Critical sociologists have unpacked these notions by interrogating negative and ambivalent experiences of friendship (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019; Eramian and Mallory, 2020; Heaphy and Davies, 2012). For young people, friendships play an important role in their identity-making, affording them opportunities to reproduce and resist the social order (Aapola et al., 2005; Bunnell et al., 2012). However, relatively little sociological attention has been paid to the ways in which structural power relations play out in friendships that have been formed across inequalities. This article addresses this lacuna by examining entanglements of friendship with everyday racism. Everyday racism is perpetrated through repetitive and mundane practices that marginalise and pathologise racial and ethnic groups and inhibit their resistance (Essed, 1991, 2001). Studies of everyday racism tend to focus on interactions with peers, strangers and colleagues (e.g. Kalemba, 2023; Nicolson, 2023; Rollock, 2012). I contend that studying everyday racism in the context of the friendships formed by Black girls sheds light on how oppression permeates, and is reproduced and resisted, in intimate relationships.

This article draws on findings from a 15-month ethnographic study conducted with 11 Black girls, aged 14–20 and living in Scotland.¹ The study included participant observation, creative methods and in-depth interviews. Black feminists have explored the everyday strategies devised and enacted by Black girls and women to contend with oppressive environments, within which struggles for group survival present as a form of resistance (Collins, 2000; Kelly, 2018). In this article, I conceptualise four different survival and resistance strategies employed by participants to contend with everyday racism by friends: challenging friends, quiet self-preservation, ending the friendship and ‘thinning’ the friendship. I argue that the participants’ accounts exemplify instances where friendships involving oppression were nevertheless endured (to a certain degree, at least) due to social necessity. This article advances current critical sociological understandings of friendship by casting light on how structural inequalities inform ambivalent and negative experiences in friendships formed across social differences.

Sociologically Unpacking Friendship

Across the last three decades, the sociology of friendship has made it clear that friendship is not merely a personal relationship, but rather one socio-culturally structured and embedded (Davies, 2019). This notwithstanding, friendship is largely conceptualised in the West as a voluntary relationship (Giddens, 1991), and by nature egalitarian, reciprocal and non-instrumental (Allan, 2003). Sociologists have charted the positive characteristics attributed to friendship, such as support, self-disclosure affection and affirmation of identity, while noting that the term ‘friend’ is used to denote different kinds of relationships (Spencer and Pahl, 2006).

More recently, sociologists have critiqued the overly positive sociological conceptualisation of friendship. They have examined the gaps between idealisations and realities of friendship as well as its negative aspects, showing that friendships can be experienced as ambivalent yet are allowed to endure, because they are entangled in other relationships and one’s sense of self (Finn, 2015; Heaphy and Davies, 2012; Pahl and Spencer, 2010; Smart et al., 2012). Simultaneously, socio-cultural scripts frame friendship as a relationship that should be easily dispensed with rather than worked on should it turn unsatisfactory. This results in hurtful experiences and painful breakdowns (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019; Eramian and Mallory, 2020). At the same time, because of the current cultural importance of friendship and its supposed benefits, being friendless is heavily stigmatised (Eramian and Mallory, 2025).

Sociologists of friendship have also contested the supposedly voluntary nature of this relationship. Studies on friendships between women with children have shown how these ties were formed through the children, out of necessity and the need for support (Cronin, 2015; Morris, 2019). Other studies have analysed how friendship choice is shaped by social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, age and life stage. Homophily is often an organising principle in friendships, meaning that there is a tendency to befriend people who belong to the same social categories as oneself (Davies, 2019). However, friendship homophily, for example in educational and professional settings, can lead to the exclusion of people from marginalised groups from resources and opportunities, thus entrenching inequalities (Fox, 2024; Read et al., 2020).

Sociological studies have also explored how the formation of friendship across social differences is constricted by inequalities and socio-cultural norms and ideologies, often focusing on cross-gender friendships (Chaudhry, 2022; Fox, 2024). ‘Successful’ friendships across structural inequalities are conceptualised as being based on recognition of such inequalities and the differences between one another, while also seeing each other as people and confirming each other’s sense of self (Rawlins, 2008). However, the mere existence of friendships across inequalities is at times uncritically celebrated as mutually beneficial and transformative (Greenland et al., 2020; Vertelyte, 2022). Instances where friendships stray from these ideals and idealisations in practice have been underexplored.

This article interrogates how oppression shapes and plays out within friendships, by examining the case of Black girls’ cross-ethnic friendships at school. Research conducted at school has shed light on the complexities of friendship and its role in young people’s identity-making and transformation or reproduction of the social order (Aapola et al., 2005; Bunnell et al., 2012). Compared with peer relationships, friendships involve intimacy and much more time and emotion is invested in them (Vincent et al., 2018; Winkler-Reid, 2016). Studies of girls and young women’s friendships have pointed to their intense emotional and moral dimensions and how they can involve exclusions based on dominant notions of femininity and heterosexuality, which are also classed and racialised (Aapola et al., 2005; Finn, 2015; Hey, 1997; Winkler-Reid, 2016). Studies of friendship across inequalities at school have often interrogated the social practices and understandings that foster or hinder the formation of these bonds (e.g. Vincent et al., 2018). One exception is Hollingworth’s (2020) study, which analyses how the friendships formed by ethnic minority working-class students with middle-class White students in secondary schools were experienced as partial and difficult to sustain. By examining structural power relations within the friendships of Black girls, this article will contribute to the critical unpacking of the prevailing notion of friendship as voluntary and highly positive.

Everyday Racism and Relationships

This article examines the navigation of everyday racism within friendships. Essed (1991) developed the concept of ‘everyday racism’ to uncover how racism permeates everyday life; how it is made and reproduced not only through structures and ideologies, but also through repetitive, mundane and cumulative practices. These practices are pernicious, as they marginalise racial and ethnic groups, pathologise their cultures and assigned characteristics, and inhibit their resistance (Essed, 2001). The concept challenges the tendency to focus on extreme forms of racism (Essed, 1991). At times, this article refers to studies that interrogate manifestations of and reactions to subtle racist comments yet use the psychological concept of ‘microaggressions’ (Pierce, 1974). However, because an analytical focus on microaggressions lends itself to an individualistic lens and can obscure how such actions reinforce systematic discrimination, the concept of everyday racism has been chosen for this article to link structure, ideology and everyday practices (Essed, 1991; Williams and Embrick, 2023). Everyday racism is normalised and left unacknowledged by White people, who possess the power to define the situation; this creates a jarring experience for racialised people,² who often struggle to pinpoint these acts (Essed, 2001) and may internalise the belief that it will be futile to challenge them (Sue et al., 2008). Racialised people often downplay or deny these acts because of the pressures of conforming to White society and the difficulty of acknowledging their subordinate position in structural inequalities (Harries, 2014; Nicolson, 2023). However, sharing such experiences with other racialised people can help in identifying and challenging everyday racism (Essed, 2001; Sue et al., 2008).

Studying how racism is entangled in everyday life and relationships is necessary for fully understanding how racism operates throughout the social system (Essed, 1991; Rollock, 2012). Studies have examined how racialised minorities experience everyday racism from peers, colleagues and strangers in the workplace (Kalemba, 2023), higher education (Rollock, 2012), politics and public spaces (Harries, 2014; Nicolson, 2023). However, little consideration has been given in sociology to everyday racism perpetuated by friends. Greenland and colleagues (2020), all social psychologists, studied friendships between African-Caribbean and White adult men and friendships between gay and heterosexual adult men. They found that participants perceived friendship and discrimination as mutually exclusive. However, a few of the participants from minority groups shared stories of experiencing discrimination in friendship but not addressing this behaviour, fearing potentially negative consequences. Relatedly, a study in education argued that students of colour in Scotland tend to downplay or ignore everyday racism by friends and peers at school, in order to fit in (Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020). The current article argues that a sociological lens is required to better understand how everyday racism plays out in friendships, and the ways in which it is reproduced and resisted.

The Study: Participants and Context

This article is based on a 15-month ethnographic study of the politics of friendship – that is, the ways in which friendship is affected by, contends with and challenges structural inequalities. The study was conducted with girls and youth workers at Intercultural Youth Scotland (hereinafter IYS). IYS is a Scottish anti-racist youth work charity that caters to young racialised people. In contrast to dominant public and political discourses that claim that racism does not exist in Scotland, racialised minorities in Scotland are subject to systematic inequalities in many spheres, including education, health and employment, and face various forms of racism (Nicolson, 2023; Sobande and hill, 2022). Studies conducted with young racialised people in Scotland have shown that there is a lack of understanding of their culture, heritage and background by school staff and peers (Guyan, 2019); that schools are reluctant to discuss issues of race with students; and that young people of colour experience overt and covert racism in school (Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020). The Black Lives Matter (hereinafter BLM) movement protests in Scotland in 2020 challenged the prevalent denial of racism yet also engendered a backlash of sorts (Sobande and hill, 2022).

Fifteen girls, aged 14–20, and three IYS youth workers participated in the study. Eleven girls were Black (of Caribbean or African descent); two were of South Asian heritage, one was of Middle Eastern heritage and one was White British. Some participants were of mixed ethnic background and/or immigrants, mostly from other European countries. Of the girls who mentioned their religion, four identified as Christian, two as Muslim and one as Sikh. Participants were of working- to middle-class background. Most of them lived in Edinburgh, where IYS was based and where about 84% of the population identifies as White and only about 2% of the population identifies as Black, Caribbean or African (Scottish Government, 2022). When IYS activities moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this enabled new participants to join, including those who lived in areas that were even less ethnically diverse. This article focuses on the 11 Black participants, as these were the ones who shared their experiences of navigating racism within friendships. Where relevant, I refer to ‘study participants’ to describe the experiences of all the participants. Because the population of racialised minorities in Scotland is very small in size and due to the sensitive nature of the data shared in this article, I do not identify the specific ethnicity, country of birth, age, place of residence or religion of any of the participants. I acknowledge that this risks homogenising differences and restricts an intersectional analysis (Jameela, 2021) of how these different identity aspects might have informed participants’ experiences of everyday racism and the particular strategies each of them chose.

The Study: Methods and Analysis

The ethnographic fieldwork in IYS took place between September 2020 and November 2021 and explored the political aspects of participants’ friendship experiences and perspectives through participant observation, creative methods and interviews. I undertook participant observation of 17 sessions of two girls’ groups, which were directed at the empowerment of participants through workshops and critical discussions of lived experiences; 26 sessions of the weekly youth club, a mixed-gender programme where participants socialised, played games, danced and performed; and nine other special events. Additionally, I designed and facilitated a total of 11 workshops in the two girls’ groups, which were based on various creative methods, including photo-elicitation and mapping (Rogers, 2017). Lastly, towards the end of the fieldwork I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with six girls (five of whom were Black) and three youth workers (two of whom were Black). Owing to COVID-19 government restrictions, most IYS programmes – and therefore the fieldwork – took place online. While friendship, including its negative and ambivalent aspects, was the original focus of the study, the issue of racism within friendship came up unprompted in one of the first IYS sessions I attended. Participant observation was therefore useful in developing rapport and trust with participants (Emond, 2005) and in observing situations where they spontaneously spoke about navigating experiences of everyday racism in their friendships. The workshops and interviews enabled me to further and purposefully explore this topic: the former created spaces for participants to exchange and discuss such experiences, and the latter allowed them to recount aspects of these experiences that they did not want to share with other participants.

Informed consent was obtained from participants in writing, and was confirmed orally throughout the fieldwork. Parental consent was not sought as myself and IYS – whose youth workers had established relationships with the participants – assessed the participants as having the capacity to give independent consent (see also Tisdall, 2011). Additionally, the study was undertaken in IYS and adhered to the organisation’s robust safeguarding policy.

While friendship is not usually considered a sensitive topic in research – as is evident from this article – it can certainly be experienced as such in certain situations. Some of the participants attested that friendship difficulties were a delicate matter, and they were not always keen to discuss it. However, the study also offered affirming opportunities for participants to share painful friendship stories. Given this situation, I strove to approach this topic in a careful manner, respecting the different wishes of participants and listening to their silences around friendship difficulties.

The data that was co-constructed in the study was shaped by my positionality and the relationships I formed with participants in complex ways. Specifically, as an Israeli of European descent, I am considered White in my home country; in Scotland, however, my ethnic identity was read more ambiguously. Some of the participants considered me a Person of Colour, while others considered me to be White. Because the participants had experienced racialisation and racism throughout their lives and I have not, it is possible they were not as open with me about such issues as they may have been with (for example) their youth workers. At the same time, because I listened to, was interested in and validated their experiences (unlike some of the White people that they interacted with), they may have put more effort into explaining situations and dynamics that were obvious to them as marginalised girls (Taft, 2007).

I recorded the interviews, workshops and some of the sessions of the girls’ groups through Zoom, and wrote extensive fieldnotes for all other instances of participant observation. After concluding my fieldwork, I analysed the data by identifying themes, creating categories based both on my theoretical framework and the data itself, and then coding and interpreting the data (Rossman and Rallis, 2017). My analysis was also informed by feedback that I received from participants when I presented them with my initial findings.

Four Strategies for Navigating Everyday Racism by Friends

Many study participants spoke of contending with othering, isolation and racism at school, where there were very few other racialised young people. They also criticised their schools for failing to meaningfully engage with their histories, cultures and achievements as racialised minorities (see also Guyan, 2019; Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020). In contrast, the programmes of IYS, an anti-racist youth charity where almost all the young people and all of the youth workers belonged to racialised minorities, provided participants with spaces where they could befriend one another. Many of the study participants were friends, with some becoming friends through IYS and others bringing their friends along to IYS, which also enabled them to spend more time together. In IYS, participants spoke of feeling a sense of belonging and affirmation, they shared experiences of oppression and collectively contested discrimination.³ Still, participants only spent several hours a week in IYS, compared with long days in school.

At times, Black participants shared stories of racist behaviour by friends, often those they made at school. This included instances where friends failed to support or even voiced opposition to the social justice issues that participants championed, particularly anti-racism. In some cases, participants also described how they responded to such incidents. Based on these accounts, and on Black feminist theory on resistance and survival strategies (Collins, 2000; Kelly, 2018), I have conceptualised the various strategies that participants employed to contend with everyday racism from their friends (see Table 1). Two of the strategies were short-term, employed when the incident itself occurred; the other two were long-term, employed in relation to the status of the friendship. I also make a distinction between the more and the less confrontational strategies.

Table 1.

Strategies for navigating everyday racism by friends.

	More confrontational	Less confrontational
Short-term	Challenging friends	Quiet self-preservation
Long-term	Ending the friendship	Thinning the friendship

Owing to the study’s small sample size and issues of confidentiality, I am unable to analyse the prevalence of certain strategies over others, nor am I arguing that these are the only strategies employed by Black girls in Scotland in such situations. Rather, these were the strategies that participants wanted to share with me and, importantly, with their peers in IYS who faced similar challenges. I will discuss each strategy separately, beginning with the short-term strategies as these were immediate. With each category, I will first delve into the more confrontational strategy, as the presumed ‘expected’ response to racism, all the more so because the participants were passionate about social justice issues. However, as my analysis makes clear, the choice of strategy was informed by various discourses, norms and institutions.

Challenging Friends

The first short-term survival and resistance strategy employed by participants was to challenge their friends’ racist actions and views. In the following excerpt from an in-person session of an IYS girls’ group, a participant described how she employed this strategy:

The six girls and their youth worker chatted about different topics, such as school exams and cultural appropriation. At one point, they debated whether racist behaviour begins in childhood or later. A few girls mentioned that they don’t have White friends at school. Sonia commented that White people make jokes that aren’t funny. Sarah told us how, in her European home country, she had no choice but to be friends with White people and she had to tell them off for being racist in a negative way. She advised the other girls not to act like she did, but conceded that she could tell them what she did because they were not children. She described how a friend told her that he wouldn’t want to be Black. In response, she told him that she wouldn’t want to have her mother leave her, and explained to us that the kid’s mother had left him. Sarah recounted how afterwards, she and the kid met and decided not to say mean things to each other, and that she made similar agreements with her other friends. (Fieldnotes, 7 October 2020)

Sarah chose to challenge a racist remark by a friend by retaliating. Speaking up against racism helps facilitate change because it challenges racial inequalities (Essed, 2001: 214). The specific way Sarah chose to challenge her friend might have been shaped by national socio-cultural norms. In a chat I had with Sarah a while later during the weekly youth club, we spoke of how, as immigrants, we both struggled with the indirect style of communication that is prevalent in Scotland. Sarah compared this with the prevailing communication style in her European home country, where she said people did not pretend to like you but rather stayed away. Sarah attested that she found it difficult not to be able to directly tell people in Scotland that she disagreed with their actions (Fieldnotes, 24 November 2020). Relatedly, in the above excerpt, Sonia mentioned that White people make jokes that ‘aren’t funny’. Given the context of the conversation and my familiarity with the study participants, I interpreted her as saying that these are racist jokes. Studies have noted that when racist ‘banter’ – a supposedly playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks – takes place among friends and peers in Scotland, its severity is often dismissed by framing it as merely humoristic (Hopkins et al., 2015: 37; Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020).

Indeed, in most of the stories that the participants shared about challenging everyday racism by friends, they seemed to prefer a more subtle approach. This is exemplified in a conversation that took place in one of the online sessions of the IYS youth club:

The young people and youth workers shared awkward and aggravating experiences in school when adults and peers assumed they were related to a certain Black person or a person of South Asian heritage, even when they had different skin tones. Valerie then recounted an incident where a Black person passed by, and her friend asked her if she knew that person. In response, Valerie pointed to a random White person and asked her friend if she knew him. (Fieldnotes, 23 March 2021)

Valerie challenged her friend’s racist remark by equating the assumption that all Black people knew one another with the assumption that all White people knew one another – underlining the falsity and absurdness of her friend’s remark. This rather mild challenge seems informed by Valerie’s awareness of racist stereotypes:

After Sarah spoke in the girls’ group about dealing with racism at school, other participants shared their own experiences of peers’ racism, with Valerie mentioning being told that all Black people are aggressive but it’s not true. Later in the conversation, Valerie shared that sometimes people tell her that she’s being aggressive and Asha the youth worker responded in surprise (likely because Valerie comes across as quite shy). Valerie explained that it happens when she does not want to do something. Sarah validated her, saying that this is like when you pinch someone and tell them not to shout. Asha asked the girls if they are ever told they are aggressive and realise that they are. The girls said no. (Fieldnotes, 7 October 2020)

The risks entailed with being perceived as an ‘Angry Black Woman’, provide another important context for how participants chose to contend with everyday racism by friends. Moreover, an implicit challenge might have been more socially acceptable than an explicit challenge because there is a lack of cultural scripts for navigating friendship difficulties (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019; Eramian and Mallory, 2020). This is especially so in the United Kingdom, where communication is conflict-avoidant (Stewart, 2005).

Quiet Self-Preservation

There were also instances where participants chose the short-term strategy of quiet self-preservation over responding outwardly to everyday racism. I contend that this was because they did not feel it was possible or safe to challenge their friends. In a workshop I conducted with the girls’ group, study participants spoke of the importance they vested in their friends sharing their own social justice values, such as support for the BLM movement. Keke responded:

[Because] to me some political opinions are morals. And I feel like if there’s someone in my circle who I think doesn’t really value those. . . [then] I don’t feel comfortable with that person [Sonia nodded, agreeing]. For example, there was an instance where someone insulted my religion. Well, I think it was an insult, I don’t think they meant it directly but to me I felt like it was kind of an insult and I pretended not to hear [that]. . . And obviously I was just kinda distancing slightly. (Workshop transcription, 21 April 2021)

Here, Keke’s strategy in response to an offensive comment made by someone in her circle of friends was to ‘pretend I didn’t hear that’. In this and other accounts, participants intuitively understood that such behaviours by friends were wrong, yet they were not always able to condemn them the moment they occurred. As mentioned, because White people do not acknowledge the oppression inherent in such acts – and, simultaneously, possess the power to define the situation – racialised people often find it difficult to define and challenge these acts (Essed, 1991). The pernicious illusiveness of everyday racism is evident in Keke’s story: she first asserted that someone in her friend group insulted her religion, then said that she thought that the comment was an insult, then conceded that it was not a direct insult, and finally framed it as ‘kind of an insult’.

Participants’ engagement with the anti-racism programmes of IYS contributed to their ability to name and criticise their friends’ behaviour retrospectively. In the workshop where I presented participants with the study’s findings, Isabella shared:

I put something on my [Instagram] story. . . it was something about race and one of my friends who is White replied to it. And I remember having this conversation over Instagram and it was really weird because part of me was like ‘this feels wrong what you’re saying but I can’t pinpoint what’s not right about it’. . . I couldn’t tell if I could say that they were being racist or not. (Workshop transcription, 16 March 2022)

After Isabella finished speaking, other participants commiserated with her and validated her notion that her friend was being racist. These accounts illustrate why confronting a friend over everyday racism was a difficult, and at times impossible, undertaking.

The onslaught of everyday racism and its subsequent cumulative effect (Essed, 1991) presented a further obstacle to challenging friends. Faith recounted how in her home (European) country:

It’s so ingrained in the society that they don’t even realise they’re being racist. . . So growing up I’m just like ‘Okay Faith, fine, let it slide, fine, let it slide’. . . [Because] it’s just too much. Obviously, when you’re in a room full of White people and you’re a student, you’re not going to, you just don’t have energy. (Interview with Faith, 27 October 2021)

Similarly to Faith’s account, Greenland and colleagues (2020) argue that one reason why African-Caribbean men and gay men in their study did not challenge discriminatory behaviour by friends was that they believed that the effort would expend energy without yielding any transformative effect (see also Kalemba, 2023; Sue et al., 2008). Moreover, studies found that racialised minorities do not address the everyday racism of friends and peers because they worry this will paint them as argumentative (Greenland et al., 2020), and because they want to fit in at school (Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020). However, Faith attested in her interview that outside of school, she did challenge friends’ racism; this further demonstrates how white-dominated spaces such as school can shape friendships and influence girls’ choice of survival and resistance strategy.

Lastly, prevalent national discourses on race and racism also contributed to choosing quiet self-preservation. While study participants often spoke about the need to act on social justice values, including in interactions on social media, Emily pointed out that: ‘Sometimes you just need to survive and stay quiet for a while before you are in a place to speak out’ (Email following the findings workshop, 20 March 2022). Study participants also spoke of how White people in Scotland are uncomfortable with discussions of race, deny the existence of racism or downplay its severity (see also Kennelly and Mouroutsou, 2020; Sobande and hill, 2022).

Ending the Friendship

In some cases, participants also chose ending a friendship due to displays of everyday racism, including a lack of support for social justice causes that were significant to them. At the end of a workshop where the study participants were asked to share photos from their phones and social media accounts that represented friendship, I inquired whether the conversation we had touched on issues they had already thought about or brought up new thoughts. Participants spoke of taking stock of the people in their lives whom they truly counted as their friends, and how they had grown closer to some friends and lost touch with others. Cece then shared:

[W]hen I was in school to be honest I was kind of a loner, mainly cause I’m kind of anti-social and then secondly cause most of them were White I was the only Black girl so I didn’t really know how to make friends. . . I literally only made friends with a girl at the end of the year. . . and I thought we were gonna be friends forever or for a very long time and then Black Lives Matter came [inaudible] other stuff and we kinda drifted apart. Not drifted apart, I literally stopped the friendship.. . . because a lot of other people kept telling her why is she silent [about BLM], how they say if you keep silent you’re literally supporting the oppressor and I told her and then she was just like. . . and it’s not something that I really realised back then but she did and does kind of culture appropriates stuff.. . . and apparently she used to say the n-word. So I wasn’t aware of all of that, so the Black Lives Matter [movement] happened and you know we stopped being friends. . . if she was a real friend she would have, you know, not agreed with me cause I’m not telling you ‘Oh you this, so you have to say I’m sorry’ but she would have at last taken a step back and tried to look at the whole situation. (Workshop transcription, 13 January 2021)

Because Cece’s friend did not support the BLM movement and refused to try and understand why this cause mattered to her, Cece decided to employ the long-term (and more confrontational) strategy of ending the friendship. For some participants, opposing the BLM movement was understood as not recognising their right to live. In a different workshop, when I asked study participants if they could be friends with someone with whom they had a lot in common with but who did not support BLM, Sun replied: ‘Then they don’t value you as a human being and they are racist’ (Workshop transcription, 14 April 2021). Relatedly, Valerie shared that: ‘There’s a lot of friendships that I’ve had which I dropped because they didn’t support the same causes [as me]’ (Workshop transcription, 24 March 2021).

In Cece’s story, her decision to end the relationship was later validated by learning that her friend had once been in the habit of using the n-word and realising that she engaged in acts of cultural appropriation. This realisation should be understood in the context of the growing public awareness and criticism of cultural appropriation following the 2020 BLM protests. The topic was frequently discussed in IYS activities: Amy, one of the IYS youth workers, shared that some of the young people spoke of having ‘friends [who] had been culturally appropriating, wearing braids a lot and they kind of were having an issue with speaking to them about it and encouraging them to stop wearing them and stop doing that’ (Interview, 27 September 2021).

While it was important to Cece to make clear that she chose to actively ‘stop’ the friendship rather than passively ‘drift apart’ from her friend, her account also reveals that this strategy was not always straightforward. Although Cece perceived her friend as ‘supporting the oppressor’, she was willing to engage in dialogue with her, stressing that she was not even seeking an apology from her erstwhile friend. This approach challenges the notion of friendship as a ‘pure relationship’ (Giddens, 1991: 90) that does not require effort; as a relationship that is only maintained as long as it is mutually rewarding, ending once it ceases to be so (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019; Eramian and Mallory, 2020). Cece’s story demonstrates the significance of friendship for young people, its moral and emotional dimensions and how it can be experienced and perceived with ambivalence (Finn, 2015; Heaphy and Davies, 2012).

Thinning the Friendship

In other cases, instead of decisively severing the friendship, a long-term and less confrontational strategy adopted by participants was to ‘thin’ the relationship. Studies have found that some friendships formed through school (by both children and parents) were circumstantial and the outcome of a specific life-course stage. While such friendships, consequently, are thinner than friendships that are fully supportive and intimate, they can still be significant (Hollingworth, 2020; Vincent et al., 2018). In Keke’s story (mentioned earlier) about hearing an offensive comment by someone in her friend circle, Keke described that she ‘was just kinda distancing slightly’ from the person, meaning that she made her friendship thinner, rather than ending it completely. In a workshop that I facilitated, I asked participants whether a relationship in their lives has changed due to a socio-political issue they championed. This was Isabella’s response:

I have one friend [who I heard supported Donald Trump]. . . So I asked them about it one time and they were like ‘Yeah I don’t think he’s that bad’ and I was like huh, right, okaaay. . . Might not hang out with you as much as I was before. . . She’s really nice and we’re good friends but also like if you don’t think Trump is that bad. . . and I think that kind of changed our relationship, our friendship. (Workshop transcription, 18 March 2021)

For Isabella, not condemning Trump was a shocking stance, tantamount to standing against the social justice values that were significant to her, including anti-racism and feminism. At the same time, Isabella conceded that her friend was ‘really nice’ and that they were ‘good friends’. Having become ambivalent about the friendship, Isabella chose to thin the friendship by spending less time with her friend. Shared time and space are an important way in which girls signify the closeness of their friendships (Winkler-Reid, 2016). The ambivalence that Isabella felt about her friend echoes a prevalent notion that ‘normative’ and ‘nice’ people cannot be racist (Essed, 2001; Rollock, 2012) and friends even less so (Greenland et al., 2020).

In a different workshop, another participant candidly shared that ‘my friends, I’m only friends with them cause I’m in school with them, it’s just to make do at the moment, they’re all White and they just. . . They’re still quite ignorant’ (Workshop transcription, 24 March 2021). Her words shed light on how, contrary to the prevalent conception, friendship is not always entirely voluntary, but in fact may be formed and endured out of necessity. As the accounts shared in this article illustrate, participants were often limited in their friendship choices at school. Reflecting on the experience of the young people they work with and their own past experience, Amy (the IYS youth worker) said: ‘When you’re in a school where 90% of the population is White, you really can’t choose and be picky and selective with who your friends are, you know? . . . it was them or no one’ (Interview, 27 September 2021). These accounts illuminate how, for young people, terminating a friendship can be constrained by the desire or even necessity to have friends in school. As Sarah Winkler-Reid (2016: 167) observed in her ethnography of girls in London schools: ‘Friendship in school is practically compulsory – to be without friends is an unequivocal sign of social failure.’ Indeed, for adults too, being friendless is heavily stigmatising (Eramian and Mallory, 2025). Thinning the friendship was, therefore, a survival and resistance strategy that enabled the aforementioned participant to retain their friendships out of necessity.

Still, the gap between the ideal of close friendship as a positive and affirming relationship (Pahl and Spencer, 2010) and its reality of everyday racism was hard to reconcile. The participant who said that she ‘made do’ with their friends attested: ‘I need another word for [my friends at school] cause like they’re not acquaintances but they’re not really friends either’ (Workshop transcription, 24 March 2021). This aligns with Hollingworth’s (2020) finding that ethnic minority working-class young people experienced friendships in school with White people as thin and situational. The different stories shared in this section also show that there are varying degrees of thin friendships – they can include some distance or verge on the non-existent.

***

More than six months after the abovementioned participant spoke of her thin friendships, I interviewed her and asked whether she feels that being involved in IYS changed her relationships. She replied:

Yes. It made me want to disengage from my existing friendships at school more. . . . I just realised. . . how much those friendships at school weren’t benefiting me at all and how drained I would feel after social interaction with them. . . It was never explicitly said but it would always feel conditional in that ‘we’ll only let you be friends with us if you pretend that you’re not [participant’s ethnicity] or Black’. (Interview, 21 October 2021)

The participant contrasted these draining interactions to ones with people from IYS that made her feel ‘happy’. Amy (the youth worker) described how racialised young people who attended IYS could befriend one another and consequently ‘be a little bit more picky with their friends, which is really good’ (Interview, 27 September 2021). Importantly, the interview with the participant was conducted after she had finished school. Taken together, these factors made it possible for the participant to end the friendships she had previously thinned.

Discussion and Conclusion

The ways that structural power relations play out in friendships formed across social differences is underexplored in the sociology of friendship. To address this gap, this article has analysed findings from an ethnographic study conducted with Black girls in Scotland, interrogating how everyday racism became entangled in some of their friendships. I have outlined four resistance and survival strategies (Collins, 2000; Kelly, 2018) employed by participants to contend with racist behaviour by friends. The first two strategies were short-term, as they pertained to participants’ immediate response – challenging friends or engaging in quiet self-preservation rather than outwardly reacting. The last two strategies were long-term, as they pertained to the status of the relationship – ending the friendship or thinning the friendship without severing it. The choice of strategy was informed by a myriad of national and local contexts.

I have argued that participants mostly engaged in subtle challenges to the racist behaviour of their friends in part because there are few cultural scripts for negotiating difficulties in friendship, alongside the prevailing expectation that disappointing friendships can and should be promptly ended (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019; Eramian and Mallory, 2020). Still, in some instances, participants experienced such friendships with ambivalence and so did not immediately terminate them. Some were willing to work on their relationships, while others thinned the friendships (to varying degrees). These strategies were heavily informed by the context of school – its lack of diversity, coupled with the felt social necessity to have friends (Winkler-Reid, 2016). A sociological analysis of oppression in friendships thus helps counter that popular assumption that painful friendship experiences are necessarily the result of personal flaws (Eramian and Mallory, 2020).

Attending to structural power relations in Black girls’ friendships broadens the sociological theorisation of critical friendships, contextualising why oppressive friendships are sometimes endured. It thereby augments challenges to the supposedly egalitarian and voluntary nature of friendship (Cronin, 2015; Davies, 2019; Heaphy and Davies, 2012). Owing to the current cultural importance of having friends and stigmatisation of those who are ‘friendless’ (Eramian and Mallory, 2025), the insights presented in this article are relevant to exploring friendships across inequalities in other settings and life stages where friendships are deemed as highly beneficial or valued, such as Higher Education (Finn, 2015; Read et al., 2020), workplaces (Fox, 2024), divorce (Aeby and van Hooff, 2019) and parenthood (Cronin, 2015; Morris, 2019). Future research should also explore how forms of everyday oppression other than racism might be navigated in friendships across social differences and compare between them. Studying how friendships inform the imagined and enacted construction of self (Finn, 2015) in such friendships can also prove fruitful: for instance, acknowledging that a friend is being oppressive can be ontologically unsettling, as it can lead to questioning one’s ability to judge others and form trustworthy friendships (Smart et al., 2012). Moreover, this problematic friendship, and especially choosing not to challenge or terminate it, can conflict with one’s marginalised identity or the social justice values one sees oneself as championing.

This article also contributes to the theorisation of how oppression permeates, is reproduced and resisted in everyday life. It demonstrates how even in intimate relationships ‘from everyday racism there is no relief’ (Essed, 2001: 202). I have analysed how participants’ choice of strategy was shaped, and was often constrained, by contexts including the denial of racism in Scottish popular discourse, norms of indirect communication in Scotland and the whiteness of the school institution, where study participants often experienced racialisation and othering. Conversely, participants’ ability to identify, speak about and criticise everyday racism by friends as well as end such friendships was bolstered by attending the anti-racist programmes of IYS and befriending other racialised young people there (see also Essed, 2001; Sue et al., 2008). The article provides a critical look at how friendship across inequalities – where both sides are ideally supposed to recognise the oppressive structures that shape their lives and affirm one another’s identity (Rawlins, 2008) – can stray from these ideals in practice.⁴ It thereby challenges the view that friendships formed across differences always reduce the prejudices of members of dominant groups while promoting the integration of members of marginalised groups (Greenland et al., 2020; Vertelyte, 2022). It also encourages those belonging to dominant groups to interrogate the everyday ways in which they reproduce oppression within their friendship, and how this might be disrupted.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the participants in the study for opening up to me about their lives and friendships. A sincere thank you to Niamh Moore and Mary Holmes for their supervision of this project and continued support. Thank you also to colleagues who provided constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article and to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: the study was funded by the University of Edinburgh.

Ethics statement

The study was approved through the ethical review process of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh in September 2020.

ORCID iD

Thalia Thereza Assan

Notes

Thalia Thereza Assan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Child and Youth Rights Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include childhood and youth, personal relationships, activism, education and creative and participatory methods. Her current research examines the relationality of children and young people’s participation in protest movements. She has published her work in journals such as The Sociological Review and Children & Society.

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