Two of my closest friends are White women. I grew up with them in in my inner circle, and I can honestly say that I never felt that they treated me as though I were less than they were because I was Black. They called me “the Doll.” They treated me like the Doll, loved me, looked out for me, and protected me. If there was an ounce of racism or prejudice in those friendships, I never saw it. My experience with them taught me something early that I still believe today: not all White people are bad, just as not all Black people are good. Don’t get me wrong—there have been hateful White people who have committed terrible acts against Black people throughout history, and the devastating legacy of racism, discrimination, and racial violence should never be ignored or minimized. Character cannot be determined by complexion. There are beautiful and ugly qualities within human beings of every race, and some of the most meaningful relationships of our lives can develop with people who do not look like us.
That personal experience is important because discussions about Black women and White women can become so consumed by racial history that individual human relationships disappear. The history cannot be ignored. Racism, slavery, segregation, unequal opportunity, discriminatory beauty standards, and stereotypes have profoundly shaped relationships between Black and White Americans. But history does not require us to conclude that every Black woman and every White woman must encounter each other as adversaries. Social psychology actually provides substantial evidence that meaningful intergroup contact is generally associated with reduced prejudice. Pettigrew and Tropp’s landmark meta-analysis examined 713 independent samples from 515 studies and found that intergroup contact typically reduced prejudice, with especially favorable outcomes under conditions involving cooperation, common goals and more equal status.
So how do White women think about Black women? And how do Black women think about White women? The most scientifically responsible answer is that there is no single “White female opinion” of Black women and no single “Black female opinion” of White women. Race does not manufacture one personality or worldview. Political beliefs, socioeconomic class, nationality, neighborhood, education, religion, family, generation, and actual interracial experiences all matter. What scholars can examine, however, are recurring stereotypes, social structures and cultural messages to which women are exposed. Those patterns can influence perception without determining what any particular woman believes.
Black women and White women also occupy the category of “woman” differently. Research comparing Black and White women’s perceptions of womanhood found shared themes—including gender-based mistreatment, friendship and community, caretaking, perceived advantage, and work-family choices—but also meaningful differences shaped by race and sociohistorical experience. The researchers argued that differences in histories of employment, domestic labor, discrimination and stereotyping have contributed to different racialized understandings of womanhood. In other words, Black and White women may both experience sexism while not necessarily experiencing womanhood in precisely the same social way.
This is where intersectionality becomes indispensable. When society historically imagined the supposedly “typical woman,” that image was often implicitly White; when it imagined the supposedly “typical Black person,” that image was often implicitly male. Black women could therefore become socially obscured at the intersection. Experimental scholarship has described forms of this phenomenon as the intersectional invisibility of Black women. Research reviewed in this area has found evidence that Black women may be perceived as less prototypical representatives of either “women” or “Black people” than White women and Black men are of their respective categories.
Beauty makes this division particularly visible. Western beauty standards have historically privileged characteristics associated with European appearance. Contemporary research examining Black women’s body image discusses the effects of Eurocentric ideals involving lighter skin and straighter hair and how Black women may experience stigmatization when their natural characteristics diverge from those ideals. Other research with Black women has found that messages about complexion and hair can come from family, peers and media and may range from endorsement of Western beauty ideals to explicit celebration of darker complexions and natural hair.
This means White femininity and Black femininity have historically not always been assigned identical cultural meanings. White women have often had greater access to the dominant society’s definition of conventional femininity and beauty. Black women have simultaneously confronted racialized stereotypes that could deny them delicacy, vulnerability or conventional femininity. This does not mean every White woman has experienced privilege in every aspect of life, nor that every Black woman experiences discrimination identically. It means race can alter how gender is socially interpreted. That distinction matters.
There is another uncomfortable dimension: beauty hierarchies can encourage women to evaluate themselves against one another. Race can then become intertwined with competition that is actually being manufactured by a larger beauty system. A woman may begin wondering, Whose hair is more desirable? Whose complexion receives more attention? Who is considered feminine? Who gets approached? Who is considered sophisticated? Research on colorism demonstrates how appearance hierarchies can influence relationships and desirability even among Black and mixed-race women themselves. The problem therefore cannot simply be reduced to “White women versus Black women.” Beauty hierarchies can produce divisions within racial groups as well as between them.
Modern representation has changed considerably, but inclusion does not automatically erase older standards. A large recent analysis of hundreds of thousands of records from advertising, magazine covers, fashion runways and editorials found increased representational diversity while also identifying persistent structural patterns in which diversity did not necessarily translate into complete transformation of the underlying beauty ideal. Representation matters, but merely placing different faces inside an unchanged hierarchy is not necessarily the same thing as dismantling that hierarchy.
Black women can therefore enter interracial female relationships carrying knowledge that their White friends may never have needed to acquire. A Black woman may know what it feels like to wonder whether a comment about her hair contains a racial assumption, whether she is being perceived through a stereotype, or whether something that happened to her was ordinary interpersonal conflict or racial discrimination. A White friend may genuinely love her and still initially lack the experiential framework necessary to recognize those situations. Friendship does not automatically produce identical life experiences.
Conversely, it would be intellectually unfair to reduce White women to racism, privilege, jealousy or ignorance. A White woman is an individual human being, not a walking symbol of American racial history. She can reject racism, challenge prejudice within her own community, genuinely admire Black beauty, love Black friends without fetishizing them, and form relationships in which race is acknowledged without becoming the sole definition of the friendship. My own friendships taught me precisely this distinction: I was Black, they were White, but our racial identities did not prevent us from becoming girls who simply loved and protected one another.
That distinction between ignoring race and transcending racial hostility is important. “I don’t see color” can sound compassionate, but friendship does not require pretending that race has never mattered socially. A stronger friendship can say, I see that you are Black. I understand that this may affect experiences I have never personally had. And none of that prevents me from seeing you fully as my friend. Likewise, a Black woman can acknowledge the historical privileges associated with Whiteness without assuming that every White woman she encounters personally endorses racism.
Interracial friendship can actually be one of the environments in which stereotypes lose their power. Research has found that people with close friends from another ethnic group can show lower levels of some forms of prejudice. A meta-analysis of cross-group friendships likewise supports an association between such friendships and more favorable intergroup attitudes. Broader meta-analytic research on intergroup contact has repeatedly found similar relationships between positive contact and reduced prejudice.
Yet there is an important scholarly caution here: contact is not magical. Positive encounters can improve attitudes, but negative interracial experiences can reinforce prejudice. A 2024 meta-analysis involving 238 independent samples found that positive intergroup contact was associated with lower prejudice while negative contact was associated with greater prejudice; notably, negative encounters could have particularly strong effects. This helps explain how one painful experience can sometimes become dangerously generalized into “those people are all like that.”
This is where both Black women and White women must resist intellectual laziness. One racist White woman does not represent White womanhood. One hostile Black woman does not represent Black womanhood. A painful interracial friendship does not prove interracial friendship is impossible. Human beings naturally categorize, but moral maturity requires us to distinguish patterns that deserve serious examination from individuals who deserve to be judged according to their own conduct.
Can Black women and White women honestly be best friends? Absolutely, because friendship is not biologically restricted by race. But authentic interracial friendship requires more than photographing yourselves together and declaring that race does not matter. Friendship requires trust, reciprocity, affection, loyalty, vulnerability, honesty and the willingness to remain present when conversations become uncomfortable. The strongest evidence from intergroup-contact research suggests that meaningful, cooperative relationships can undermine prejudice rather than inevitably reproduce it.
There may even be moments when good friends disagree about race. A White woman may initially interpret an encounter differently from her Black friend. A Black woman may wonder whether her White friend can possibly understand something she has never experienced. Neither situation automatically means the friendship is fraudulent. The decisive question may be what happens next. Does one woman listen? Does the other explain without demanding ideological perfection? Can each admit when she does not know something? Can they remain curious about one another rather than defensive about their respective racial groups?
There is also an asymmetry worth recognizing. Research has found that the relationship between intergroup contact and prejudice can differ between majority- and minority-status groups. Historically disadvantaged people may approach cross-group relationships with concerns about discrimination that members of dominant groups do not experience in the same way. Thus, asking a Black woman to “just forget race” can require her to ignore experiences that have genuinely shaped her life. Cross-racial friendship works better when difference can be discussed without either woman being reduced to that difference.
And women should be careful not to allow men, beauty culture, or social media to turn them against one another. The question of whether Black women or White women are “more beautiful” is itself a trap. Beauty does not have to operate as a racial tournament. A White woman’s beauty does not subtract from a Black woman’s beauty, and a Black woman’s beauty does not require the degradation of White women to become visible. The expansion of beauty should mean adding faces to the human portrait, not replacing one racial hierarchy with another.
Perhaps that is one reason my childhood friendships remain meaningful to me. My friends did not make me feel as though my Blackness placed me beneath them. They called me the Doll. They protected me. We grew up together in Germany, and what I remember is not constantly standing on opposite sides of a racial divide. I remember friendship. That personal history cannot erase racism from the world, nor should it. But racism existing in society cannot erase my personal history either. Both truths can occupy the same intellectual space.
Woman to woman, we need conversations sophisticated enough to hold both history and humanity. Black women should be able to speak truthfully about racism, colorism, exclusion, beauty politics and stereotypes without being accused of hating White women. White women should be able to enter genuine relationships with Black women without being presumed guilty of beliefs they have never expressed. Scholarship can teach us how social categories influence perception, but it should never tempt us to stop seeing individuals.
Maybe the most important question is therefore not, What do White women think about Black women? Nor is it, What do Black women think about White women? Those questions are too large for any honest universal answer. A better question is: What happens when one woman truly gets to know another? Research on intergroup contact suggests that sustained positive relationships can weaken prejudice, but friendship gives that finding a human face.
I already know what happened in my life. Two White girls got to know a Black girl. The Black girl got to know them. Somewhere along the way, categories became people. They saw me as their friend—their Doll—and I saw them as my friends. We were not required to rewrite history to love one another. We simply refused to allow history’s ugliest divisions to dictate the character of our friendship. Perhaps that is the lesson worth carrying forward: race can explain something about our experiences, but it does not have to determine whom we are capable of loving. Woman to woman, we can see the differences, tell the truth about them, and still choose to see each other.
References
Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 90, no. 5, 2006, pp. 751–783.
Tropp, Linda R., and Thomas F. Pettigrew. “Relationships Between Intergroup Contact and Prejudice Among Minority and Majority Status Groups.” Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 12, 2005, pp. 951–957.
Aberson, Christopher L., Carl Shoemaker, and Christina Tomolillo. “Implicit Bias and Contact: The Role of Interethnic Friendships.” The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 144, no. 3, 2004, pp. 335–347.
Pettigrew, Thomas F. “Intergroup Contact Theory.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, 1998, pp. 65–85.
Settles, Isis H., et al. “Through the Lens of Race: Black and White Women’s Perceptions of Womanhood.” Qualitative research examining racial differences and similarities in women’s understandings of gender and womanhood.
Davies, Kristin, et al. “Cross-Group Friendships and Intergroup Attitudes: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 15, no. 4, 2011, pp. 332–351.
Zhou, Shelly, et al. “The Extended Contact Hypothesis: A Meta-Analysis on 20 Years of Research.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2018.
Research on gendered racial socialization among Black women, including messages concerning skin color, natural hair and Western beauty standards.
Research on intersectionality and the social perception or “invisibility” of Black women at the intersection of racial and gender categories.
Research developing a Black feminist model of body image and examining racialized body dissatisfaction, Eurocentric beauty standards and gendered racism.
Research examining colorism and the ways skin-tone hierarchies can influence perceptions of Black and mixed Black-White women.
Meta-analytic research examining positive and negative intergroup contact and their differing associations with prejudice.