“Tanner Colby woke up one day and realized that he didn’t know any black people – his friends, former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, just about everyone he knew and interacted with was white. And this lopsided state of affairs, as he soon discovered, was hardly unique. Pressing those friends and coworkers about their own lives, he found the same thing to be true again and again: even with a black president in the White House, and despite a half century’s passage since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, true integration has made few inroads into many Americans’ lives. Curious, Colby set out to learn exactly why that was. What he found was the strange story of race in post-civil rights America, a world in which segregation never really died but was simply transformed. Some of My Best Friends Are Black follows four stories that show how the strict legal barriers of Jim Crow came to be replaced by social mores and economic policies that endeavored to maintain a separate and unequal status quo: keeping the races apart, fueling suspicion between them, and enhancing the wealth and status of those who continue to profit from a divided America. Starting with the clash over school busing at his own white-flight high school in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, Colby then went on to Kansas City, Missouri, where the segregated city planning of a wealthy real estate mogul gave birth to a century of racist federal housing policy. He followed that with a look into the troubled history of affirmative action in New York’s advertising industry, in which he was once employed. From there, he traveled all the way down to the swamps of southern Louisiana, where Jim Crow split the Catholic Church in two – giving rise to “the most segregated hour in America” – and where one small town decided that the only way to heal itself was to put its divided churches back together again. Written with a boundless curiosity and a biting sense of humor, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. Though it tackles the larger political and economic issues of race, it is also a history of the human heart and mind. It weaves together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people, black and white, showing how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind – and how far all of us have left to go.” – BOOK JACKET
Reviews with the most likes.
Reading books - fiction or nonfiction - about racism always makes me uncomfortable at some point, but it's worth it because I learn something new about America, myself, other people, and circumstance. Today, in America, racism in the ‘public sector' is illegal. Any race can own a home, go to any public school, apply for any job, and live anywhere (so long as they have the financial or academic backing). So why is it that there is still such glaring disparity in these areas? Neighborhoods virtually segregated, schools that favor a race by population, and professional career areas that do not match the racial makeup of America?
This book tries to answer these questions. And one of the larger differences between this book and most other books I've read on racism is that the writer is white. And in a way, doesn't that mean I'm racist for even pointing that out? Who's to say whether a white man can have any authoritative opinion on racism? Well, I generally believe that the best source of any life experience is one who has experienced it. In the author's case, he grew up outside of Birmingham, AL in a well-to-do white neighborhood in the 1980s. His neighborhood was heavily white (and still is), and his school was heavily white. His school was one of the schools that bused students in from black neighborhoods to comply with federal anti-segregation laws, or those laws that came after the famous Brown v Board of Education in Topeka, KS. So Colby's a white guy, but he does have a lot of experience with racism, albeit an informed outsider's perspective.
4 major perspectives are covered throughout this book. The first section talks of schools and forced integration post-Brown v Board. Most of this consists of Colby's high school and a few students he knew that he interviewed during the course of writing this book. There's a lot of history too, about Alabama, and about forced integration which resulted in the busing of students from black neighborhoods to white schools in white school districts. I really enjoyed this section, and the author gives some insight into the goods and bads of forced integration, many of which I'd never bothered considering before this.
The next section was my favorite - housing, home ownership, and the mortgage industry. I used to sell homes; I would proudly wear my little R (is for REALTOR) pin showcasing the largest professional association in America. Well, to my chagrin, I learned that much of my famed club's original Code of Ethics was chock full of racism. When I was taking classes to become licensed, I learned terms like blockbusting, redlining, and steering, and just memorized those definitions. Colby's chapters on housing get to the core of these terms, and how the past behaviors still produce barriers today. I really thought when learning about blockbusting for my license exam that surely people didn't get away with that? How could they? Turns out J.C. Nichols. He became so wealthy from his racist real estate business that he was able to build subdivisions, and build the famous Kansas City Plaza. A chapter like this makes me think we have a long way to go in America to fully get rid of racism. I mean, we have laws against this kind of stuff now, right?
And then chapters about those careers that continue to be segregated today. The last few chapters talk about segregation in church, and one town that has 2 Catholic churches almost across the street from one another, but one is black and the other's white.
Although I liked most aspects of this book, I did start to get a little annoyed with the author's overly chummy writing style. But overall, some excellent history and eye-opening perspectives can be found here.
