Can friendship transcend the boundaries of race? Do certain companionable qualities or life circumstances make interracial friendships more likely to flourish? Which factors work against them? How do friends deal with clashing viewpoints on family, culture, and discrimination? Should true friends forgive one another occasional incidents of racial ignorance or even insensitivity?

A black woman who has had white friends from the time she was a little girl, Emily Bernard has long contemplated questions like these. As a writer and a politically conscious citizen, she has also considered the question of whether individual friendships might be the solution to larger problems of intolerance and racism. For answers, she sought out writers from an array of backgrounds - white, black, Latino, Asian, Jewish - and asked them to share experiences, insights, and feelings. The result is a collection of thought-provoking, strikingly diverse essays on a timely, vital, and complicated issue.

About the Author
EMILY BERNARD is the editor of the critically acclaimed Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

ISBN: 0-06-008276-3
Amistad, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Price: $23.95 / $36.95 (Can.)
240 pages