Victoria Vilton
Black Friend: Essays by Ziwe Fumodoh. Abrams Image, 2023, 192 pp., $26
Ziwe Fumudoh is an icon. It’s in the way she dresses, bright and distinctly feminine. It’s in the sharp glint in her eyes as she interrogates the likes of actress Julia Fox, influencer Chet Hanks, and former Congressman George Santos. There is no rhyme or reason to the trend of virality that dominates our present cultural consciousness. Ziwe seems one of the few who the internet deems consistently important enough for fame. “I demand to be taken seriously as a clown,” she says, and her social media presence carefully balances these two sides of her—the absurd and the levelheaded. This all makes for a unique and compulsively watchable career trajectory. Ziwe offers us something special: an incisive, raucously funny Black woman with a talk show.
In Black Friend, her debut essay collection, Ziwe turns her cutting wit inward, revealing to readers a side that she tends to keep private. It’s an old trope that in situations of intense racial tension, a non-Black person will excuse their displays of racism by saying, “I’m not racist, I have Black friends.” The line is so common that it has become a joke, one that Ziwe often weaponizes in her interviews. Ziwe’s thesis for Black Friend frames the collection as a rejection of being a “Black friend” to non-Black people. “This book of essays offers moments of extreme discomfort (and the subsequent growth) in my life around the role of ‘black friend.’” In 15 darkly funny, poignant essays, Ziwe forces the reader to grapple with their conception of a “Black friend” while exploring her own relationship to the title. The choice of essays rather than a memoir focuses the book not just on Ziwe’s life but also integrates her views on political and cultural issues. Venturing into the formal medium of a book while maintaining her characteristic humor, Ziwe toes her personal line between serious and clown.
Given her years spent sharing herself with the world exclusively through digital media, it was not an obvious choice for Ziwe to write a book. The never-ending onslaught of celebrity memoirs and poetry collections can be exhausting and overwhelming. Audiences are expected to keep up with the relentless production of “corporate celebrities,” carbon copies with similar stories and little to say. But Ziwe has long since established herself as someone unique. Her unapologetic, ruthless interviews began on YouTube, then moved to Instagram Live. From 2021–2022 she hosted her eponymous talk show on Showtime. In interviews, she confronts both controversial and well-liked celebrities about their public lives, personal lives, and allyship to the Black community. Featuring age-old questions like “How many Black friends do you have,” her uncomfortably playful and searing interviews have given Ziwe a platform. But she doesn’t stop there. Everything about Ziwe’s media personality has been crafted with the precision only a politically conscious comedy icon (a word she uses lovingly and often) could cultivate. The set of her Showtime show looked like Barbie’s dreamhouse with its almost obnoxiously pink walls, chairs, and props. She is often in the highest fashion, draped in decadent fabrics of all colors, and she never has a hair out of place. But behind all of her charm and wit lies a brutal interviewer ready to make her subjects squirm in discomfort. Each of her essays, in its own way, does the same.
In perhaps the most chilling essay in the collection, Ziwe describes being stopped and questioned by a white man and woman in a car while walking near her AirBnb. They demanded she explain her presence there. Ziwe writes, “I just stared at him in my indignant way that over the past year had prompted rambling, nervous confessions from interview guests on Instagram Live … When I am afraid, I listen.” Ziwe finally rationalized to the man that the charged political climate was her reason for being uncomfortable around him. Distressed at the implicit suggestion that he was racist, the man jumped to absolve himself. Calling her their “black friend in the back,” the couple revealed a young Black girl in the back seat of the car, hoping her presence would pacify Ziwe. This was a frightening essay to read, and Ziwe skillfully relays her stream of consciousness as she navigates the situation. The reader feels Ziwe’s fear, anxiety, anger, and disgust alongside her. She is specific about how the interaction made her feel, both in the moment and in the context of being a “Black friend” herself.
Though this case was extreme, it is only one of many examples where Black bodies are used by a majority that refuses to recognize their own racism. A little girl was not a child who needed parents, but rather a token, something to be owned, absolving her parents of accountability. Herein lies the role of the “Black friend”: they do not exist on their own, but rather, as an accessory to whiteness. They are an escape from the suggestion of racial guilt.
But Ziwe establishes this as patently unfair, and she combats the idea of a “Black friend” as a supporting character. She does this in many ways, beginning with the physical presentation of the book itself—the cover is bright pink, sure to catch a curious reader’s eye—and the unique use of her mononymous name (which she insists is because her last name is simply too complicated for Westerners to read with ease). As an interviewer and host, Ziwe commands the viewer’s attention in her viral videos; as an author, she allows herself the time and space of writing to firmly assert who she is. There is nothing secondary about Ziwe Fumudoh, and she wants you to know that.
As the collection continues, Ziwe centers the idea of a “Black friend” in the reader’s mind, reminding them that she is not a nameless reference point for ignorant racism. “My art is not about success. My art is about me- my life, my experiences, my perspective … I remind myself that I am one of a kind. I am special. I have something to say.” She gives the reader absolutely no space to doubt this, nor should she.
In a memorable essay, Ziwe unpacks a speech delivered by Spike Lee at her elite preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts (which she pointedly leaves nameless). Addressing a mostly non-Black crowd, Lee firmly emphasized his support for affirmative action, stating that “race is a merit.” The speech left behind a school struggling to reconcile his words with their own conception of their anti-racism. Ziwe handles this polarizing topic tactfully and goes on to unpack what this experience did to her, leaving her isolated in a fairly homogeneous student body. She walks the reader through her high school experience, then through college, where she had to move past her classmates’ judgment to focus on carving a path that would work for her, and finally, to developing her career. She recognizes her distinct advantage while acknowledging that she does not speak for everyone who looks like her.
The rest of the essays follow similarly: Ziwe opens a discussion, centers her perspective, and allows the reader to take what they will from her writing. She offers no apologies. She contextualizes her personal experiences in these real-world debates, demanding attention for her story and definitively rejecting any notion that she is anything other than a main character.
Ziwe’s essays are not works of outstanding literature. To absorb every word she writes, one must be, to some degree, chronically online. While Ziwe grounds herself in reality, the book is fashioned for a generation of people who participate in a culture that requires hours and hours of screen time. In one story about a culturally appropriating Peloton instructor, Ziwe writes “I permit myself to pick apart everything about him that I don’t like for a forty-five-minute uphill climb that ends with a Diana Ross x Skrillex dubstep remix.” Her language and one-off comments are best understood by people who have traversed all the corners of the internet.
Amid throwaway references and sarcastic one-liners, the purpose of this collection is to flesh out Ziwe’s self and worldview. Ziwe, a talk show host, a character, a person, seeks to clarify exactly who she is. She is an artist and a performer entirely on terms she defines for herself. She plays into popular internet culture but does not allow it to limit her. She refuses to temper anyone’s discomfort with her opinions and her identity. This book is valuable for precisely that reason.
In Black Friend, Ziwe effectively establishes herself as anything but the trope of the supporting character. Her compulsively readable collection, though it is laugh-out-loud funny, refuses to be trivialized. One cannot finish this book without learning something not just about Ziwe’s world, but also about all of ours. Black Friend works because Ziwe is not pretending to be anything other than herself. She is not interested in teaching the reader “how to be this or that.” She writes to show off her “takes” on the world and her role in it. With tidbits of social and political commentary, these essays stand as a testament to the type of person Ziwe is: the main character in her own entertaining, passionate world.
Victoria Vilton is a sophomore in Branford College from Brooklyn, New York. She is a lover of eclectic earrings and has tried—and failed—to learn the saxophone. In her free time, Victoria likes to say “LOL” out loud and mention George Harrison once an hour.