For many of us, friendship is the soft place we land when the world is hard. For Kate Johnson, friendship is also a spiritual discipline and a technology, one that can help us survive an unjust world and transform it.
In Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World, author Kate Johnson—a Black Buddhist teacher and activist—draws from early Buddhist teachings, Black feminist thought, and her own lived experience to state that how we love each other is interwoven into how we pursue justice. Her work asks a powerful question: what does liberation look like in everyday life, between actual people, right now?
Love as a Fierce, Protective Practice
Love itself is a resource, especially for those whose existence is often questioned. The Buddhist concept of metta—“loving-kindness” or “unconditional friendliness”—is not, in her perspective, a soft-focus sentiment. She presents it as “a protection spell so fierce that it works in two directions”:
- It protects others from the harm we might cause if we act from fear and hatred.
- It protects us from the guilt and shame of causing harm unknowingly.
Love is “the willingness to extend oneself for the purposes of our own or another’s spiritual growth.” That extension can look like difficult conversations, creating boundaries, or choosing not to collapse into defensiveness when we are challenged. It is neither passive nor naive. It is the fuel that allows us to stretch beyond our comfort zones “with wisdom,” and in doing so, to taste our “true nature.”
Loneliness, Authenticity, and the Cost of Hiding
Researchers have long been warning of an epidemic of loneliness. Johnson names this as a spiritual and political crisis as much as a medical one.
We can be surrounded by people and still feel utterly alone. For her, that ache is often a sign that we are not able to be fully ourselves. “Authenticity is an antidote to loneliness,” she writes. When we are “shrinking, projecting, or performing,” it makes sense that we will also feel unknown, even to our closest friends.
For marginalized people, that hiding is often born of wisdom; not all spaces are safe enough for the truth of who we are. Johnson does not romanticize radical openness in a world that punishes Blackness, queerness, disability, and etc. But she is also honest about the cost: “Hiding inside of our friendships and the loneliness that follows can be habits, holdovers from an earlier time.”
Radical friendship is the slow, brave work of finding and building relationships where more of us is welcome, and where we can risk being known without being destroyed.
Friendship as a Practice for Liberation
Johnson is blunt that truly radical friendships “require our wholehearted effort.” She rejects the idea that friendship should always be easy. Social media can often mask the reality that “friends can also break your heart,” and that this is not necessarily a failure. From a Buddhist perspective, she writes, heartbreak just means “there’s work to be done.”
That work includes:
- Naming our hurt honestly: loneliness, disappointment, comparison, the pain of changing or ending relationships.
- Tracing its roots not only in our personal histories but in the systems we live under.
- Daring to imagine what relational freedom would look like, and then taking small, concrete steps toward it.
She uses the Four Noble Truths—the Buddha’s framework for understanding and ending suffering—as a metaphor for relational healing, turning them into questions we can all work with:
- Where does it hurt in this friendship?
- How are clinging, fear, or oppressive systems involved?
- What would freedom from this particular pattern feel like?
- What path of practice, both inner and outer, might move us in that direction?
In this way, friendships become laboratories where we practice skills needed for broader social transformation: telling hard truths, taking accountability, setting and respecting boundaries, refusing to abandon each other when “misfortune strikes,” and learning how to repair after harm.
Black History Month invites us to remember not only the heroes and the progress, but entire lineages of care, resistance, and imagination. Kate Johnson’s Radical Friendship is rooted in that. She stands alongside Black feminists, womanist theologians, and movement elders who have insisted that love is not a distraction from struggle; it is the medicine and the method.
Johnson does not offer friendship as a replacement for policy change or institutional transformation. She is clear that we need mass movements to dismantle harmful systems and protect our planet. What she offers is a way to sustain ourselves and each other so we can stay in that work, as well as a reminder that the world we’re fighting for must also be practiced between us.
“Enlightenment,” she notes, is sometimes described in Zen as “intimacy with all things.” In a society that profits from our disconnection—from ourselves, from the land, from our ancestors, and from each other—radical friendship is a quiet, daily resistance. It is, in her words and in her life, a way of “loving each other well” in an unjust world, and of refusing to give up on the possibility that we can all, together, be free.
Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.
—bell hooks
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KATE JOHNSON is an acclaimed teacher, writer, and facilitator. She leads programs and retreats integrating meditation, somatics, social justice, and creativity around the world. Kate also works with individuals and organizations seeking greater sustainability through the cultivation of wise relationships. Visit www.katejohnson.com to learn more.
A case for friendship as a radical practice of love, courage, and trust, and seven strategies that pave the way for profound social change.
Grounded in the Buddha’s teachings on spiritual friendship, Radical Friendship offers seven ways to live our deepest values in relationship. Drawing on her work as a meditation teacher and on her experiences growing up multiracial in a racist world, Kate Johnson brings fresh insight to time‑honored wisdom, showing how authentic connection with ourselves and each other can counter the divides created by structural oppression. With stories, practices, and reflections at the end of each chapter, she guides us in showing up for our own and each other’s liberation—offering a hopeful path toward collective well‑being, one friendship at a time.