Book review: "Some of My Best Friends Are Black"

Some of My Best Friends Are Black, by Tanner Colby (Viking, 2012) is a book I didn't expect to like. Just skimming a few pages at random to get a feel for it, I recognized the author's white, liberal, anti-Republican stance. (He calls Richard Nixon an asshole, which may be true but he should've said the same of Bill Clinton!)

Obviously, I thought, "The Strange Story of Integration in America" -- that's the book's subtitle -- is going to be a defence of the noble ideal, the downtrodden "African-Americans" and a condemnation of the "white racism" that caused integration to fail. Not so.

True enough, the bias is there, but Mr. Colby sees and writes truthfully about the problems and fallacies of the greatest experiment in social engineering in the history of America. He finds that, 50 years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, true integration has made few inroads into the lives of most Americans. Some of My Best Friends Are Black tells four stories to make this point.

Part 1 is "Letter from a Birmingham Suburb", which recounts the fight of wealthy, white-flight Vestavia Hills AL to keep its schools white. When federal courts ordered desegregation by busing, Vestavia's high school got some black kids from neighbouring Oxmoor, and some other black kids from the inner city. A handful of the better-off black kids were accepted by their white peers. The rest segregated themselves, for instance by establishing their own section of the school cafeteria. Meanwhile, the Birmingham schools became blacker and blacker, and today are effectively as "separate but equal" as they were before Brown v. Board of Education.

In "Planning for Permanence" (Part 2) we learn the geography and history of Kansas City MO, where Troost Avenue marks the "Berlin Wall" between the blighted black part of town, to the east, and the prosperous white areas to the west. The further west you go, the nicer KC becomes, until finally you get to the very posh "Country Club District" which spills over into Kansas. This, Mr. Colby tells us, was all planned and deliberate, achieved by a technique called "block-busting", which he describes in detail for any realtors who don't know how to do it.

One small area on the east side of Troost held out. It's called "49/63", after the intersection of two streets at its centre. There, a couple of Jesuit priests and some white folks who were not horrified by the prospect of white neighbours organized a citizens' group to help newcomers get decent financing, and keep up the neighbourhood (and property values). They tried to build a community, and were moderately successful, albeit without much participation from the black newcomers, for reasons which Mr. Colby doesn't quite get a handle on. Today, "49/63" is the only quasi-integrated neighbourhood east of Troost.

Possibly the weakest of the book's four parts is No. 3, "Why Do Black People Drink Hawaiian Punch?" It's about Madison Avenue and the world of advertising, which Mr. Colby writes about from personal experience as a creative in more than one New York agency. He analyzes the hard choice faced by blacks entering the industry -- whether to try to join the "old (white) boys network" which pervades general advertising even today, or try to make it on their own, using black media to sell black stuff to black folks.

Because of the colour-blindness of the Internet, Colby argues, black-only advertising is no longer viable. Does that mean black practitioners are now working in general advertising in large numbers? Errr, no. Despite a spike in black employment in the industry in the 1970s, top black creatives in New York today number in the single digits, just as it was in the early `60s.

Finally, Mr. Colby looks at the world of religion in "Canaan", Part 4. He tells the story of the twin Roman Catholic parishes -- Sacred Heart and Christ the King -- of Grand Coteau LA, deep in the heart of Acadiana -- southern Lousiana's Cajun Country. In theory a Roman Catholic parish should correspond to a defined geographic area, and each parish should have one (1) church. But in LA -- unlike any other place on earth -- it had become the norm to have overlapping white and black parishes.

In the 1960s the Church decided that it should try to make "real" the principle of the equality of the races, by integrating its white and black parishes. The author describes in detail the struggle of two bishops and 11 parish priests -- 13 if you count the ones that came back twice -- to unite "The Church of the Sacred Heart of Christ the King". The white parishioners were willing, although not very happy about it. The real opposition came from a black faction, who wanted to stay in their own building, worshipping in their own way with people they were comfortable with. Human nature!

After 40 years of struggle, the two churches finally coalesced as St. Charles Borromeo. In the rest of Louisiana, dual parishes -- black and white -- are still the norm. And across the entire country, separate (but equal?) churches are stronger than ever. As Dr. King said, "11 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America." Here's a quote from Some of My Best Friends Are Black:

"As the black middle class spread out in search of suburbia, black churches followed the migration. Once established, they became centers of gravity, accelerating the move and concentrating it...
"It would seem that just about everyone has settled quite contentedly on opposite sides of the spiritual tracks. By the most widely cited statistic, 93 percent of all churches in America are racially homogeneous. And if you every stop to suggest that maybe those churches should do something about it, people just look at you like you're crazy."

I know we're running a bit long here but I can't resist adding one more snippet, buried in the middle of Part 3, which sums up the dilemma of integration very nicely. The emphasis is mine.

"Starting in the late 1960s, America hurled its public schools headlong into a hugely disruptive, shot-in-the-dark experiment. We spent billions of dollars, all of it just to corral the Children of White Flight and the Children of the Dream and put them under the same roof. Given that historic opportunity, we call came together and...we sat on opposite sides of the cafeteria. Then we went and hung out at different clubs and fraternities at opposite ends of college campuses, or at completely separate colleges altogether.

"Ever since Brown v. Board, there's been a steady chorus of academics and politicians pronouncing all the wonderful things that integration is supposed to do for America. Integrated schools will produce better educational outcomes. Diversity programs will give us integrated workplaces that offer competitive advantages in a multicultural world. Etc. It's all a lot of crap.

"Integration doesn't do anything. It's something that is done, by people, and only by mutual choice.... Among those who were give the opportunity to integrate, most of us chose not to."