Who Are Your 'Quick And Deep' Friends?

Death, Sex & Money

• Episode: Who Are Your 'Quick And Deep' Friends?
• Website: Death, Sex & Money
• Feed URL: http://feeds.wnyc.org/deathsexmoney
• Duration: 00:13:43
• Published: 2020-01-29 18:00

Last week, we partnered with the NPR podcast Code Switch to bring you two episodes all about race and friendship. If you haven’t heard those episodes yet, definitely go back, and take a listen to those first. 

As part of that project, we also put out a survey about how race has factored into your friendships. More than 1,000 of you have taken it so far, and we’ve gotten some really interesting responses. And we’ve also heard from some of you that taking the survey felt...ill-fitting; that answering questions about the number of friends you have outside of your race feels like an experience designed for white people. 

We wanted to talk through some of this with Dr. Deborah Plummer. She's a psychologist and professor, who’s studied cross-racial friendships and helped us create our race and friendship survey. Her latest book is called “Some of My Friends Are…: The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships.”