Pushing. You know, I did have one white friend who I won't name, and his parents conveyed to me that I was a bad influence on him. Really, I don't think if it would do with race, It just had to do with me, big asshole. Oh that's funny.
I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are.
Some of my best friends are dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestled with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country.
And today we are finally talking about us. The interracial friendship the show is based on.
That's right. We're going to tell you how you too can have a successful interracial friendship. Three quick ways to do it, guarantee.
And make your life happier.
Just kidding, but we are going to talk about interracial friendships. We're going to talk about the social science behind them, what the social science gets right, what it gets wrong, and why these friendships are important.
So I've been thinking a lot about our friendship. Man, Remember that time that makes me happy?
To hear.
Remember that time we were on the like this big public radio talk show promoting some of the Best Friends Are.
Of course, that was one of our first promos that we were on a show, and we were talking about basically the conceit of our show, which is, you know, one of us is black, one of us is white, right, and that our friendship didn't necessarily mean a lot as far as changing structural issues, but we're here to talk about to talk about what we are trying to do, that's right.
So here we start taking all these calls. It's a call in show, and people are like, well, I'm so happy to talk to you Ben and Khalil, because you know, my daughter's sixteen and she's white and she just offended this black girl at our school and she has no idea what to do. Can you help us figure this out?
And it was caller after call her. So the next caller was a black woman who was like, this woman at work is trying to be my friend, and I'm not sure if I like her. We became the interracial buddy whisperers, that's right. It was sort of the opposite of what we were hoping to do, but we leaned into it. You know, we were like, we weren't going to tell people we were going to do this, and
that's right. In a way, maybe we were like, hey, this is this is much more professionally lucrative, like guess is what we should be.
Doing, or just you know, maybe much more helpful. So it got us to thinking about how rare these friendships are.
That's right, that's right, And what does.
The actual research on the frequency and significance of interracial friendships actually tell us?
Yeah, yeah, so you're right. So let's look at some research, some social science, and maybe we're going to learn something about about interracial friendships, but maybe we'll also learn something about ourselves and what makes us friends. I like that it's a win win, or maybe what we discover is like we shouldn't be friends. So we looked at this study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and they did surveys of American friendship friendship networks in twenty twenty two.
And what we found is there's a ton of other research it also supports their findings, including from Pew, and what they found is white Americans their friendship networks are on average ninety percent white so of all their friends, nine out of ten of them are white. Yes, and more than that, sixty seven percent their friendship networks are like one hundred percent white. Are all white? No friends who are outside their race, That's right.
If you go to their Facebook pages, there is not a single black or brown face anywhere to be found. Now, turns out for black folks they are a little bit more engaging.
Outside of the race.
The study said that Black American friendship networks were around seventy eight percent black, so not quite as bad as white folks, but surprisingly not as good as it is for Latinos and Asians.
Some people would think that Latinos and Asians would be even more exclusive, but it's actually the opposite. They have more friends, even more friends who are outside their social circles, who are of different races.
Yeah, and some researchers speculate it's the smallness of at least for the Asian population that they kind of can't help but have people outside of their community, even their size in the population. All right, So big summary for this research. Essentially, compared to people of color, white people have the smallest percentage of friends who are not white, and even more interesting than that like, the more education white people get doesn't change this. It's still the same problem.
Come on, white people, come on, white people, Come on, my people, Come on, my people. We need to work on.
This, so listen. In nineteen fifty four, this researcher named Gordon Allport wrote this book.
Called The Nature. You're using the way back machine. We're going all the way back to nineteen fifty I'm a historian. Don't I get to it? I interrupted you, but keep on going, all right, all right.
So this is important because this is kind of like where this whole set of ideas came from.
And it's called what's the name of the study?
Again, I'm say the name of the study is called The Nature of Prejudice. And Gordon Allport is famous now for establishing what's called contact theory. And basically it's really simple. He argued the different racists spending time together in pursuit
of a common goal would reduce prejudice. Okay, And he actually was doing this research at a time when the military had just been desegregated in nineteen forty eight, a little bit after World War Two, and some of our listeners who recognized nineteen fifty four was a pivotal year for Brown versus Board of Education what schools were desegregated.
So this was so this is really thinking about about right at the start of integrated America and how to do it out of it segregated America.
Yeah, because the segregation was essentially supposedly on life support. And so Allport was a social psychologist and he figured, hey, we psychologists should be able to help solve for how white people in particular get comfortable with getting to know black people and opening up society. So he theorized that in order for prejudice to be reduced, in order for interracial friendships to thrive, like hours, four conditions would need to be met. And I'm just going to simplify things.
Yeah, So like.
There's equality, cooperation, and clear rules. So does this make sense?
Yes, equality, commonality, cooperation, and clear rules. Maybe maybe a way to understand it is that apply it to our friendship. You have this, we have this lifelong friendship. That's right. We've been friends since freshman year of high school yep, and here we are, you know, thirty some years later. And I think in terms of commonality, let's start there that you and I surprisingly only had one class in high school together, but we're in the same school and
we actually meet at a workplace. We work at Hyde Park Computers together in ninth grade. We start a job together.
Yeah, our real origin story is I'm fourteen years old working in a computer store as a freshman in high school and at some point I break my thumb and I need help.
And here you get hired, You get high, get hired to do the most rude, mentary work, and you're my boss, you're my superior. And yeah, I mean we didn't instantly become friends, but we sort of at least like in this idea, we're in the same space, we're hanging out.
Yeah, let's pause on that for a minute, because this whole thing about commonality and equality is really about like people meeting us peers where there isn't hierarchy because you know, the old, the old historical problem is that you know, black people were slaves to white people, and so it wasn't about like proximity or simple contact if it was a very hierarchical relationship. So we are in this workplace experience together, which is really when we start to become friends.
And then that was like September October I remember our freshman year. By spring we're both playing tennis together on the tennis.
S that's right. And then on the tennis team, you know, I mean, I'm kind of the tennis prodigy star.
Oh is that right? Don't forget I have most improved player two years in a row. I got a matter of time.
I will never let you forget that. Yeah.
So it is the context. It's the classic content where black and white people come together, you know, break down their prejudices in pursuit of a common goal and become friends. Right, that's the way it's supposed to work.
We're still equals. We're still equals in the sense of we're operating the same sphere and under the same rules in a.
Way, Yeah, because if you think about it, in the moment that Allport was doing this work, like the military, was this space where people came together as equals for the common purpose of defending the nation with a shared values of patriotism and clear rules of like how do
you work together? And so whether it's a sports team for a lot of black and white Americans over the years and certainly today, or whether it's a school environment or even a workplace, it's this idea that if people are in a common space, generally in a flat environment where everyone has kind of equality, then good things will happen.
That's the idea. Yeah, so we have to we're going from contact, which is different from a friendship that lasts a lifetime, essentially, Like, how does that happen? That's right? And all right? So I'd say one is, we come from this community. We're allowed for just this contact to happen, right, I mean that seems pretty rare.
Well, let's just unpack that, a man, we come from a straight up integrated neighborhood. Like there's probably like three of them, you know, in the state of Illinois, and maybe fifty around the country. And I'm obviously joking a bit here, but it's unusual that in and of itself is a bit unusual.
Yeah, and maybe I mean, even thinking about that a little bit, so that neither of us was the only in the other circle. That's right.
I think, if my memory serves me correctly, I have more white friends, meaning people I had called friend and hung out friends and hung out with, than you had white friends.
That's possible. In fact, I thought at some point that I didn't want to be friends with you because you were two, you had too many white friends. I was worried, but then you know you you pass the test eventually. Okay.
So look, these four conditions at all port set up defined an entire field of how do you reduce prejudice by making friends or making contact with somebody else? Okay, But it turns out that most people didn't have this experience. The data we just looked at in twenty twenty two shows us just how badly this hole turned out over these last several decades.
So we know that now that that that these groups are really exclusive, that people white people, but even of other races aren't hanging out together. Yep. And so since the nineteen fifties, segregation is outlawed in the United States, and yet people still aren't coming together. And so when we think about the spaces historically or even over these last sixty seventy years where people have different race are
coming together, So where are they? They might be in schools, right, yep, yep, that's right, they might be in the military.
That's right. Probably one of the biggest areas that people often celebrate as places where prejudice and segregation broke down.
In fact, once we were at a baseball game in Denver, you and me, and because we're together, everyone around us was saying, you guys must have been in the military together, right, because they had never seen like black and white friends together. That's right. You know, sports becomes this kind of like, you know, almost like a metaphor for bringing people together under these you know, equal areas where people with different experiences could bond.
And I guess William Hollywood Movies telling this story.
Yes, in a workplace, right, so places that are beyond your own private sphere, which are somehow public, yep.
And so for you and me, like that's kind of our story, right. We come of age in the nineteen eighties, meeting in our integrated high school.
And you know, so we're in this integrated space of all these ways, and a lot of people even from our high school and shared our experiences, didn't become lifelong friends with people of different races, just by the statistics we're even cited.
Which creates this really, this a conundrum, right because to some degree, you know, we are a product of a moment of integration in America. We grew up in an integrated neighborhood, We go to an integrated high school. We have these integrated experiences, and it's like it turns out we are like rare creatures relative to the vast majority of white or black people.
But I also don't think I don't think there are any conversations like, you know, you should have even on the other sense, oh you should have you know, friends across racial boundaries, you should have more friends. I don't think it was just talked about did you have conversations like that of like the meaning of this not at all.
I mean, at best, I would say we really were kind of in an integrated neighborhood on the South side Chicago and High Park. It was largely middle class, which mitigated against the ways in which low income people often are doubly burdened and stigmatized, and in a way that like some people might be remembering their black friends from their suburban high school or something like, you know, I wasn't busted in to go to.
School with you, right, and the community.
Yeah, you didn't come from some like white part of town to go to this integrated high school. You lived in a black neighborhood. So there were some unique things about being in an integrated community. And I got to say, like I adopted your parents very early on. I called your parents Ma and Paul, Like, I can't remember a time when I haven't called them that. Now you called my mom.
What shorty rough? She was a stand in mom, And so that sense too of our larger family circle sort of you know that this is being normalized and part of our experiences that And then I guess i'd say, like, you know, it wasn't like my parents were the only white and Jewish adults you knew, and for me it was and like your mom was the only black woman I knew. That's right because student for those figures, because.
You had a soon to be black mother in law Carol's.
House, That's right, I was. Yeah, So this is the other thing about in you know, as we're dating across racial lines, do you think we ever talked about that of like what that meant beyond you know, the either the intrigue or the dangers or the significance. Did we I don't remember ever having a conversation specifically about like about about race and dating.
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean I don't remember like in our mutual friendship groups, there was definitely we weren't the only ones. But I have to say, like I mean, counterintuitive probably to other people, it was because of your black girlfriend now wife, Danielle, that I had two of my high school sweethearts. I mean, like it was. It was a win win for me. No matter how we look at.
It, you might have not dated any black girls if it wasn't for me dating a black girl. Is what you're saying.
No, that is not That is not what I'm saying. But befive, listen, We're going to talk more about this as we go from being boys to men and grow up and really unpack interracial friendships and look at a little bit more research to see how it helps us explain what's been going on in this country.
We'll be right back after the break.
All right, we are back on some of my best friends are and Khalil and I are talking about interracial friendships. This is a meta episode in a way. And Khalil, we've been thinking about how how studies, how research explains even our friendship. And so you had just said right before the break, it's one thing to be friends as kids, but but what does it mean to be friends as adults. That's a whole other. A whole other issue and what does it.
Mean you just have a friendship that lasts, right. A lot of people were like, oh, yeah, you know one of my best friends was filling the blank when I was in high school. What I haven't talked to this person in twenty years.
Yeah. So there's this book from twenty nineteen and it's written by several sociologists. It's called In the Company We Keep, and it's exactly about this subject. It's about interracial friendships and about this transition from childhood to adulthood. The authors looked at and analyzed Americans who were kids in seventh to twelfth grade in the nineteen nineties, essentially us right at this time when multiculturalism is being celebrated as like
the American ideal. Yes, yes, And then they grow up and the researchers study them again in two thousand and eight when they're between they're about thirty years old. So we're in the Obama era, the so called post racial America.
This wholehold we go from color blindness to post racialism with this, with these two cohorts of young people.
And a lot of people fifteen thousand people to sort of think of that they were friends as teenagers what happened as adults?
Right, These are fifteen thousand respondents. This is the basis of the study, and here's what they found. I mean, the simple story they found is that kids who attend more diverse schools like the one we went to were more likely to have what they call cross racial friendships as adults, even if they didn't have them as kids, meaning as younger kids. That's pretty big deal and helps
to lay the foundation for you know how. The research tells us what are the necessary conditions for interracial friendships to thrive.
So underlining that again, going to an interracial school is a huge deal. This is defining in terms of having cross racial friendships.
Yes, but it turns out that even that reality and knowing that reality, going back to the nineteen fifties, at the end of legal segregation in the Brown Versus Board of Education decision, the line separating black and white people in the United States is still stronger than any other racial groups, meaning black and white people are still not together, which probably is as much a story about the failure of integration and housing in so many other spaces than anything else.
So meaning they may not have gone to interracial schools exactly, and even if they had, they still it didn't last over time.
Or that they went to schools, but people were being bussed and shuttled about and it wasn't actually extending in the classroom.
Yeah. Yeah. So in this same study, they also looked at interracial romantic relationships, so not just friendships but friends with benefits and got it, and they found the same thing. They found that you were much more likely to have across racial romantic relationship if you went to a diverse school, and they also found that you were more likely to get with somebody of a different race if you had a friend of a different race. That's me. That's the
wingman theory of interracial day. If you want to date across racial lines, you need a wingman who's of the race you want to date. That's what it explains that.
So what you're saying is it's only because of me that you have this beautiful black woman as your wife that you've had for how long have you all been married? I've lost track.
Now, yeah, a little bit, a little bit, But you might be right, you might be right, But these researchers are actually finding that if you actually have a more authentic relationship with another culture. It's more likely that this is a kind of real relationship. Yeah.
So, like essentially the hot that person's exotic to me kind of flash in the pan love interest is not what we're talking about here.
Yeah.
Well, I want to talk about when we grow up a little bit. So let's talk about college. Because to be honest with you, Ben, I mean, all that we've been talking about about our origin story, that's just four years of our relationship. We're going on like thirty seven. So and we you know, we didn't spend time together really after high school for long time. We both go our separate ways.
Yeah, And the truth is, like, so if we were in an interracial space as teenagers, we both go to predominantly white colleges.
We both pronominantly white, overwhelmingly white.
Overwhelmingly white. Yes, we go into these spaces and separately.
Yes, yes, right, So you're at the University of Rochester. I go to the University of Pennsylvania. And I have to tell you, man, I went to pen like I didn't know shit about structural racism. I mean, I know
it's counterintuitive. Some people might think about my identity and all of that, and what I do today, but kind of the specialness of my childhood did not prepare me for what I encountered when I became five percent of pens black population in nineteen eighty nine, when I became a freshman and.
You had a white roommate. Freshman year, I remember, I had.
A white room mate, Peter.
Like he was.
He was taller than you, and I went from like, you know, tall tall buddy to even taller buddy. Peter and I got along swimmingly, but we did not become friends right we defined.
I remember search. I remember visiting you on campus and staying in his bed and it was kind of funky. Yeah.
Well, he wore the same blue jees literally all year long. I just honestly, by the end of the year they were standing up in the corner. But outside of Peter as my freshman year roommate. Out of four years at Penn, I literally met and kept as a close friend, one white guy.
I mean, I just want to say, they're like, they're like twenty five white guys who are listening to this now, and They're like, damn, I thought I thought we were still friends.
I thought, No, let me, I mean this sincerely, like if I had mostly white friends in high school, it was just the opposite. In college, my whole world became you know, African American this and that. I had tons of black friends. I joined a fraternity, to a black, traditional, historically black fraternity my freshman year, and I mean, it just it made my life wonderful. I mean, and there's no critique whatsoever. But it could not have been more different than what I'd experienced growing.
Up, which is so interesting. So in this overwhelmingly white space, you create your own overwhelmingly black bubble within it.
Well, I mean black people do that anyway, but you know, yeah, most of the world, when you're in segregated Black America or segregated white America, Yeah, black people figure out how to make sense of their smallness of population relative to white people in all the powerful ways white people exist among us.
Yeah. So I'm thinking what you said, and again how much I thought about structural racism before these dynamics. We just took so much for granted, it was weird going to a school that was overwhelmingly white. It was weird for me. And I'm thinking back to even teen years in youth, like one of my experiences or partly what defined my experience of being the only one in a lot of spaces.
Oh, you mean being the only one guy among people.
Which is which is a kind of valuable perspective to get to think about race, you know, to think about like what what most minorities experience all the time. It's just like and then to know like, oh, my whiteness is a thing rather than a neutral thing or it doesn't exist. You know that that whiteness is also race, because I'm being seen from my race right now. And to enter in a space where that that calculus never
came up, it was disorienting. There wasn't the equivalent thing to do that you just said, which is like let me create my own Like I didn't join in all black space, and it wasn't like let me maybe in some really small way, I found a group of integrated people that like, like, that's their value.
You were trying to recreate kind of what home had been.
Like Yeah, but it was impossible to do. It was impossible to do in this situation.
That's so fascinating because I didn't feel like I was consciously doing something in search of a black identity. But I have to say to you like, I get it. There weren't there wasn't home on campus. It was one or the other.
So I'm thinking about how you and I communicated this even during that time, Like we did, yes talk about our experiences, we probably talked more about about some of these racial issues as they came up and over the summers where we hung out NonStop still because it was just part of our experience. Yeah.
Well, I was thinking about that because I think actually the strength of our relationship in college was less about what happened during the school year when we were away from each other, even with these occasional visits, and more about how we reconnected when we came home. And in that sense, I think our relationship deepened and strengthened because while we were changing in these other environments that monopolized most of our lives. You know, for those two months
we were home, man, we were actually working. And that's when we came up with our favorite pastime, which was competitive support. Remember that metaphor for working out together.
Or doing whatever we're doing, yeah, hanging out together, yeah yeah, yeah.
So we would challenge ourselves within the context of like if we challenge ourselves by how much more weight we could lift today, or how many more basketball games we can play in one day? We'll be better at everything. And that was really that was a special time. I mean, our summers together in college were incredible.
And this is a question about I mean, this is actually might be outside of race, but it's impossible not to consider it when you think about our dynamics. But this is just about how any two people solidify a friendship from childhood into adulthood, because I'm thinking about two moments between us, and one is when I was like in my early twenties, I traveled abroad, and when I came back, you were the one who picked me up
at the airport and you were working in Chicago. You were dating someone I had been away for over a year yep. And I remember us having like, in that moment, a very like explicit conversation of how to like recalibrate our friendship in adult terms.
I remember the feeling. I literally have an image of this day of you getting off the air poor.
You had like this weird haircut, like a.
Buzz stud, and I hadn't seen I hadn't seen you where with that look before. But I don't remember the conversation, so what do we say to each other.
We need to get to know each other as adults. Whatever presumptions we have about each other, we have to sort of think about them. Anew, let's like, let's like not presume anything and think about also the ways that we've changed.
Yeah, and I gets it.
It was a really useful conversation to like move forward.
Yeah, I get that.
Here here's the other thing, Khalil that when we were in our twenties and I had gone to graduate school and I was thinking about my next thing, and I started teaching. You had been working as an accountant, and at that time you decided to become a historian, to enter a PhD program in history. And the question is, like, if you had remained an accountant, whether we would still be friends. That's a right question. It's like a joke in a way, but I'm also serious, Like our interests
totally aligned, like our lifelong interest aligned. Yeah.
I think honestly, it's fair to say that had I stayed on that route, we may not have stayed as close. I think it would have been a closeness issue because the things we could talk about, the things we could share. I mean, and the truth is like it was your father who had been who was and it continues to be a historian at the University of Chicago as a retired professor. Like, he's one of the first people I talked about when I was about to make that move.
And so even thinking about, like the life trajectory I was on ran through a relationship with your own father, which meant it ran through you.
And then the shared interest, you know, not coincidentally, is about race and inequity and just these issues like these are the things that we've been talking about for the last thirty years, and we've shared that exploration and that path together. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the more I think about, if we could invent a new race, it would be you and me together. Hm hmm.
Well that's weird. Let's let's let's let's take let's take a short break, and when we come back, let's think about the ways that these interracial relationships, these friendships, what do they even matter? Like what difference do they make?
All?
Right?
Man, So we've mapped basically our whole friendship, you know, and here we are working together, we're making a freaking podcast together and talking about our past all the time, and so pretty clear that whatever.
Map podcast about talking about our past.
Yes, so it's pretty clear that whatever we've been up to for a long time works because after all, after all, like the whole point of our show, the point of interracial friendship is also like how do we reduce use racism and all the fucking damage and death in mayhem that comes with it.
Yeah, now the stakes are incredibly high for this. I mean, it really matters that people do come in contact. So the first study that we cited that listed all the statistics about white people and black people having their own sort of exclusive social networks that they're not hanging out
with people across race. They also in that study asked people questions, and they found that white people who didn't have black people or other people of other race in their social networks were less likely to think that the slavery, the legacy of slavery and discrimination still mattered that had an impact on society. They were less likely to think that a history of racism mattered. This is like defines our political moment our divide here in the country right now.
Yeah, so there's actually a huge cost to the failure of people to experience a meaningful integrated relationship and ship, because at the end of the day, these folks that you just described, you know, white people who don't have integrated social networks, basically dismissed structural racism. And so you can't solve for structural racism if a majority of the white population doesn't even think it's real.
Nom hmmm. So let's think about us and sort of as a model for this.
Yeah. Yeah, So I like to put it this way. We know that segregation is rampant in American society and to some degree as bad or worse in some instances than it was in the nineteen fifties and sixties. And so integration is necessary but may not be entirely sufficient. So let's talk about what more we think might be required. And I think that's when the broader set of experiences
that we had. So you could live in an integrated community, you could go to an integrated school, and yet if the parents and the social network that you're actually part of this integrated isn't fully invested in your relationship, right, then it's probably not going to be the strongest outcome.
Yeah. So we were talking about you know, both of our parents, our sets of parents were like embraced each other fully as their standing child. Everyone around us was like, yeah, that friendship is meaningful. Yeah, our bosses, our coaches, our other friends.
That's right, John, mister g shout out. The whole community to some degree supported you and me. And I'll just say, for the record, I don't have any other white friends from my high school years. All those people I talked about at the top of this show, like, I didn't have any relationships with their parents. I mean I went over their houses a few times to have to have
a meal, you know, for one reason or another. But there was nothing that came anywhere close than my relationship with Ralph and Ernestein.
There are some old Jewish people in Hyde Park who just like calling their lawyers. They're changing their will right now. You had been in it and now you're out.
I'm talking about my high school friends, high school friends only.
Well.
I have one final takeaway, and it's an important one because I teach about Kenneth Clark, the famous social psychologists who did the Doll studies in the nineteen forties that ultimately helped to inform the story that segregation was deeply harmful and led to the Brown versus Board of Education decision.
So Kenneth Clark described, yeah, describe yeah a little bit.
So it kind of encapsulates all that we've been talking about. So ten years later, in nineteen sixty five, Ish Kenneth Clark writes a book called Dark Ghettos. And in this book he's looking at the failure of integrated high schools in New York City. And so here's a guy famous for helping to desegregate Southern schools. But ten years later he's like, schools in New York City are so segregated they are also deeply harmful to not just black kids.
And here's the biggest takeaway. He said, an integrated school, whether it was in New York or Birmingham, Alabama, was not just about increasing literacy at test scores and what kids learned. It was about building relationships. It was about a social contract. That is that democracy itself depended upon black and white people being together for long periods of time, getting to know each other, and working together to solve complicated problems, even if they were math problems in third grades.
It was the fundamental building block for a democratic, just racial, egalitarian society.
Yeah. Yeah, the sense of that the schools an integrated school is so vital to have any of this going on. And what we know is that that doesn't even exist today, that seventy years after desegregation, we still have these structures that keep us apart. And basically, you know, if people are in proximity to one another, if they're in contact with one another, that's not going to that's not enough. I mean, we've talked about all the ways that we have more, but that is the start that people need.
They need that start, they need that contact to begin something.
Yeah, and without it, the bottom line is you can't build on it. There's no foundation. It's all broken. And so this is where we begin.
Folks.
Next time you call us, who'll say, The next time there's a proposal to do something with our schools that open up access to them, you say, yes we can. The next time there's a new zoning proposal to the township officials to do affordable housing, you say, yes we can, because those are the fundamental structures that keep us apart and make it nearly impossible to see the kind of friendships that you and I have lived, loved and enjoyed all these years.
Yes we can, Obama, I like that Khalil, You're loving on some Obama. I love you man, love you too.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil Dubron Mohammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan. It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keyshel Williams. Our engineer is Amanda Kwang and our managing producer is Constanza Gallardo.
At Pushkin thanks to Leitol Molad, Julia Barton, Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, John Schnarz, Greta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young from his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his music at his website Averyaryong dot com.
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a five star rating and a review and listen even if you don't like it, give it a five star rating and a review, and please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you.
Ebony and Ivory, Perfect Harmony and Perfect Time Money side by side on my piano keyboard.
Why don't you love Me,