Pastor Thang’s Community Car, Mama Enatye’s Cooking, and Durga’s Dancing: Friendship as a Response to Injuries of Inequality in the Context of Refugee Resettlement

While considerations of violence in relation to refugees typically foreground the violence of forced displacement, I extend the conversation to consider the violence refugees face in the U.S. in the forms of poverty, xenophobia, and discrimination. Drawing on Celeste Watkins-Hayes’s concept of “injuries of inequality,” I explore friendships that, I argue, serve to partially mitigate the effects of such injuries. Informed by ethnographic research, I consider the ambiguities of friendship as a response to violence through three case studies. These cases feature Thang, a pastor who practices friendship with the Zo community; “Mama” Enatye, who is a friend to her Ethiopian Orthodox community and to displaced young mothers more generally; and finally, my own embodied experiences as a researcher befriended by Durga, an asylum-seeker from Pakistan. I suggest these cases reveal the necessity of more creative, institutional thinking about friendship while also exposing systemic changes needed in the U.S.