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

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.