We Broke Down The “Bad Art Friend” Story For Everyone Who Didn’t Read It Yet

BuzzFeed Daily: So, you know, Dawn is an extremely flawed protagonist, to say the least, and — I would say protagonist in her brain and maybe some other people. She’s constantly seeking external validation for her charitable acts, and the subject of white saviorism plays very heavily throughout this story. Would you attribute Dawn’s actions at the beginning to white saviorism, or is she just being annoyingly performative? How do you even parse the two?

NM: It’s a tough thing because I don’t necessarily think that her actions in the very beginning are white saviorism. I do think they’re more on the side of annoyingly performative, in the beginning, but I do think her behavior is very specifically like “white lady,” because I think it’s something that some people of color have gone through, where you have a white acquaintance and they get a little overly familiar with you or think that you’re better friends than you are.

And like I said, Dawn didn’t even have her phone number, but expected some amount of interaction with her random kidney Facebook group, which I think again is just very white behavior. But in the beginning, at least not quite white saviorism. I actually think that’s what makes Sonya’s story a little bit different, in that she does kind of cover that white savior angle in a way that wasn’t really present in Dawn’s Facebook posts.