Hey, it's Anna. Last week, we partnered with the NPR podcast Code Switch to bring you two

episodes all about race and friendship. How race has come up in your friendships, what happened next,

and why it can be so challenging to make and maintain cross-racial friendships.

If you haven't heard those episodes yet, definitely go back and take a listen.

We also put out a survey for all of you to take about how race has factored into your friendships.

You can find it at death,sexmoney.org slash friendship.

More than a thousand of you have taken that survey so far, and we've gotten some really

interesting responses.

And we've also heard from some of you that taking the survey has felt a little ill-fitting,

that answering questions about the number of friends you have outside your race makes it

feel like it's a survey designed for white people.

Because for some of you, that's the reality of moving through majority white spaces as a person of color.

So we wanted to talk through some of your responses with Dr. Deborah Plummer, a psychologist and professor who studied cross-racial friendships and written about it in several books.

Her latest is called Some of My Friends

Are The daunting challenges and untapped benefits of cross racial friendships. Dr. Plummer is on the

phone with me now. Hello, Dr. Plummer. Hello. So I want to talk with you about some of these

daunting challenges and untapped benefits. That's something we heard from our listeners

when we were hearing stories about race and friendship. And I want to know first how you came

to research this cross-racial friendships. Was there a moment in your life where you paused and

said, huh, I want to take a closer look at what's happening here? There certainly was, you know, my good friend, Yvonne, who is actually African-American.

We share the same kind of family background and professional background.

And on a walk one day, we do a lot of walking.

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