When I ask people, "How many black friends do you have?" I can see in their eyes that they are doing their own sort of approximations. If you answer anything above ten black friends, it is quite obvious to anyone within earshot that you pulled an arbitrary number out of thin air. If you answer anything between six and ten, you look like a weirdo, albeit very popular, who commodifies the brown people in your life. And if you have fewer than three black friends, you do not have enough people of color in your life and are definitely part of the problem. So, four to five black friends becomes a signifier that you are the good kind of non-black person. You have black people in your life, but not so many that it feels like a fetish. Your black friends average around 4.5 because friendship is fluid and you need people to know you're not counting those black people, just throwing out a ballpark. These black friends make up enough people to start a basketball team, share a large pizza, and fit into a midsize Subaru sedan, so of course you are one of the good ones.
from "how many black friends do you have?", in black friend: essays, and submitted as evidence that ziwe is one of the funniest people alive
