Kelly Darden Jr. still remembers one of the first times he experienced the “black friend defense.”
Back in high school, a group of white classmates dressed in Confederate-inspired clothing as part of a social club called the “Rebel Rousers” and insisted they weren’t racist when confronted because some of them knew Darden, who is black.
“It was insulting,” the 64-year-old Greenville, North Carolina, man recalled Thursday. “I was insulted by it even when it was occurring.”
Darden and countless other African-Americans have experienced variations of the “black friend defense” — saying that a person can’t be racist because of the color of the company he keeps — for generations. And the trope played out in front of a national TV audience this week as Republican Rep. Mark Meadows defended President Donald Trump against testimony by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen , who claimed the president is racist. Meadows, of North Carolina, quickly sent social media into a frenzy when he pointed to Lynne Patton, a black Trump administration staffer, and said Patton never would tolerate working for a racist .
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