From white fragility to the white best friend: The politics of race, solidarity, and friendship in Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie (2019), Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? (2022), and Poorna Bell’s In Case of Emergency (2022)

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (2019), Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? (2022) by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, and In Case of Emergency (2022) by Poorna Bell are three recent popular fiction novels revolving around young, single, urban, minoritized women and their love lives, careers, family relations, and friendships. All three texts can be read as a continuation of chick lit, a genre of women’s writing that rose to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s. While adopting the generic features of early chick lit texts, novels such as Queenie , Yinka , and Emergency are more overtly political than their white predecessors and explicitly address racism and whiteness. Queenie , Yinka , and Emergency deconstruct the workings of whiteness on both the systemic and the personal level, revealing how it functions as an ideology, how it affects the relationships between the heroine and white people, and how the two levels are interconnected. The article shows how all-encompassing the effects of whiteness are for the heroine in her everyday life and the difficulties it poses in her cross-ethnic friendships with white women.