In a telling scene, Josh says his mother Ginger, "I seem to recall that the first time Drew got beat up there, you said to dad, 'Get my kid the hell out of that shvartze school.' All of a sudden you weren't a liberal."
Ginger blanches. "Of course. Once we saw that your lives were in danger..."
In his unfinished autobiographical novel Black Cracker, Josh describes his nearly-fatal lynching at age eight by the friends and family of his classmates Jeffrey and Bobo:
"But I'm one of you, I'm a nigger, too." My words came out muffled with my face in the dirt.
"That's right, choke, go ahaid and choke!" came another voice from the pack. I saw someone's old-lady shoe kick me in the head.
"We want chu' to hate us!" came another voice.
A bucktoothed lady with a lisp added, "Thaths right, thucka, an we wanna kill yo' momma and yo' poppa and all yo' kind."
"I didn't know I was white until I was ten years old," says Josh in the documentary. "I've been obsessed with negroes ever since. It's a love/hate relationship. I feel like I was both damaged and enriched."
Josh tells me, "I had no awareness of Jewishness when I was a kid. I thought 'Jew' was just a dirty word you call someone. I thought it just meant 'you sonofabitch,' or 'you bastard.'"
Suffering from suicidal depression most of his life, Friedman "was heavily involved in drugs. I was smoking hash every morning in the boys' room. Between the ages of 13 and 16, I was stoned every day. I dropped out of highschool.
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