I look at the clock.
3:59 PM.
March, 1984.
Sometime in the next sixty seconds my friend Dave will knock on the door of my dorm room, because from 4:00-4:30 we're going to watch He-Man: Master of the Universe.
We do this every weekday afternoon.
Dave comes to my room because the t.v. reception is not as good on his side of the building.
We watch the show, and then we go and meet up with our other friends
in the dining hall of our dormitory.

Of course it's not as simple as this, an interracial friendship built by watching a cartoon together every day. There were, in fact, lots of cartoons. Bugs Bunny, vintage Merrie Melodies, and always the Three Stooges at 3:00 AM on the weekends when we got back from the bars.

Looking back at the building of this friendship I can see the ways I have been shaped by this group of friends, which included some white kids from the St. Louis suburbs, from Springfield and Rock Island, Illinois (and some from neighboring states); some black kids and several Hispanic kids from the Chicago area; and various others who came and went over the years.

This was not in any way an idealized version of multicultural friendship such as the media might represent, where interactions are wiped clean of all the possibly offensive references and prejudices which permeate social interactions between racial groups in this country. However, it was a group of people who liked the same things, who were all, I suppose, open enough to see the advantages of choosing friends for reasons of compatibility which excluded race as a primary determining factor.

(I have to say it makes me smile to define our friendship
with such academic-sounding language as "primary determining factor"
when what I was really doing was making
2:00 AM drunken trips to Burger King for 99¢ Whoppers,
and watching t.v. and drinking whiskey while lying in the inflated rubber raft
that served as Ray and Manny's only living room furniture.)

The factors which determined our friendship were playing football on the weekends, cartoons, happy hours, pizza, and perhaps if I am honest a kind of inability or refusal to fit into the more racially-divided categories that were appropriate for each of us. Economically, we all fit somewhere into a broad range of working-to-middle class families who supported our efforts to get a college education (although most of us probably spent less time in class than our parents would have approved of if they had known about it).

I had other groups of people that I knew:  people in theater, because I acted in plays; people who took the same course of study, public relations; and people I met as a waitress at a local restaurant. All the other people in our group had similar networks. But this particular group of friends has remained a part of my life when other people I knew in college have disappeared into the past without a ripple to mark their passing.

The reason I present this information is because whenever I talk about Race I think about these friends, particularly about my friend Dave, who has a true genius for bringing people together. He is the one who really keeps this network alive and evolving through cross-country moves, marriages, children, and divorces. And because he is a friend and so dear to me, and because he was one the first close friends I made who came from a different racial background, his presence in my mind is one of the filters through which all discussions of race, all the theories and interdisciplinary discussions of cultural studies, critical race studies, race & writing studies, etc., must pass.

So imagine, if you will, 
Patricia Williams and Ruth Frankenberg passing through the lens of 
He-man, Master of the Universe (and later She-Ra, his sister). 
This may help to put my efforts in this text into perspective.

These are happy stories of friendships formed and maintained in spite of differences and injustice. These were spontaneously formed connections -- difficult in the ways young friendships often are. Among the difficulties that I can remember are many moments when I missed cues or ignored and smoothed over prejudices that created gaps between us. Specific moments when I must have failed to see or resist incidents of bigotry. Times when I failed to make the shift to Dave, or Jeff, or Ray's point of view, and as a result damaged their faith in my friendship.

But the friendships were never ruined, and I think we are better able now to talk about and share discussions and experiences where race has made a difference. But our ability to put those things aside has created a space for me, at least, to grow and learn about the ways my experience as a white girl from a Midwestern suburb interacts with -- connecting to and diverging from -- the experience of my best friends and companions. It's not that I want to, in any way, disparage the efforts of Patricia Williams to point out the deep schizophrenia of our awareness of and attitudes about race, or the efforts of Frankenberg to describe the multiple ways we hide from the knowledge that race is indeed a powerful barrier--a signifier which shapes our lives.

I just wanted, really, to share and remember a series of moments when, though interwoven with the painful divisions race can create, it was o.k. to be naive. It was o.k. to feel a connection that was not bounded by race but by the half hour between 4:00 and 4:30 and a black-and-white t.v. with tinfoil on the antennae. Of course it's more complicated than that.

But it was fun.