TANNER COLBY

                                                            TANNER COLBY

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America

By: Tanner Colby

 

An incisive and candid look at how America got lost on the way to Dr. King’s Promised Land. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, equality is the law of the land, but actual integration is still hard to find. Mammoth battles over forced busing, unfair housing practices, and affirmative action have hardly helped. The bleak fact is that...moreAn incisive and candid look at how America got lost on the way to Dr. King’s Promised Land. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech, equality is the law of the land, but actual integration is still hard to find. Mammoth battles over forced busing, unfair housing practices, and affirmative action have hardly helped. The bleak fact is that black people and white people in the United States don’t spend much time together—at work, school, church, or anywhere. Tanner Colby, himself a child of a white-flight Southern suburb, set out to discover why.
Some of My Best Friends Are Black chronicles America’s troubling relationship with race through four interrelated stories: the transformation of a once-racist Birmingham school system; a Kansas City neighborhood’s fight against housing discrimination; the curious racial divide of the Madison Avenue ad world; and a Louisiana Catholic parish’s forty-year effort to build an integrated church. Writing with a reporter’s nose and a stylist’s flair, Colby uncovers the deep emotional fault lines set trembling by race and takes an unflinching look at an America still struggling to reach the mountaintop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huffington Post
 

 

In 2008 few people would ever suspect Tanner Colby had no black friends -- not even Tanner Colby himself. He did, after all, live and work in New York City, socialize among liberal, open-minded people and log several volunteer hours on Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.
But while it was unprecedented, Obama's 2008 election prompted Colby to have a "not-small" realization, as he calls it in his new book "Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America."
"I didn't actually know any black people. I mean, I've met them, have been acquainted with a few in passing, here and there. I know of black people, you could say. But none of my friends were black. I'd never had a black teacher, college professor or workplace mentor. I'd never even been inside a black person's house," he writes.
"What did [Obama's election] really prove except that it's easier to vote for a black man than to sit and have a beer with one," Colby said in an interview with the Seattle Times.
He soon learned that many of those in his circle didn't have any black friends either, a reality that led him to four parts of the U.S. to explore both the successes and failures of racial integration -- Birmingham, Ala., where he attended high school and would examine school segregation; Grand Coteau, La., where generations of his family had been rooted and where he'd examine church segregation; Madison Avenue in New York City, where he had been employed and would seek to understand workplace segregation; and Kansas City, Mo., previously unfamiliar territory, where he'd examine housing segregation.
Following his journey and the release of his book earlier this month, Colby spoke with The Huffington Post about what he uncovered.

 

What did you discover about how these four locales ultimately shaped your circle of friends?
One thing that wouldn't be a surprise to black America, but kind of is news to white people, in that we don't really talk about it on our side of the aisle, is that you have two stories of integration -- one is the overcoming of institutional barriers that structural racism has put in place and then you also have the internal debate within the black community itself of whether or not to integrate. We never really talk about that side of the equation in white America because what black people do or don't do really isn't our concern. Black people are only our concern if they show up in our world.
In all four areas, once you've dealt with the racist institutional barriers, integration really came down to "Do black people want to integrate or not?" Whether it's black ad agencies or black churches, it comes down to [that]. You can take down the barriers, but if blacks choose to stay in their own neighborhoods and institutions, then you haven't changed much. That was new to me

From your research in these four areas, does racial integration really exist?
It does where it does and it doesn't where it doesn't. Segregated schools are really a housing issue at their root. We spend all this political capital on these "integration" programs ... meanwhile nothing was done to fix the housing problem, because Republican or Democrat, whites didn't necessarily want blacks in their neighborhoods. It's much the same with job discrimination in that we've been pursuing all these legal solutions, but so much of workplace discrimination is subtle biases and cultural inclinations that divide us.
 
Do you have any black friends now?
I do -- a couple. But for the opportunity to go out and write this book, I wouldn't have made any new black friends because I'm 37 years old and I'm married and your social universe constricts as you get older.
It took many many months of becoming an educated person about race to the point where black people wanted to be my friend. It's not about me making black friends necessarily; it's about me being a person that black people want to be friends with.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, integration isn't something you do for yourself; it's something you do for your kids. At 30- and 40- something we can be cordial and respect each other, but not get to know each other on an intimate level. It's the responsibility of people our age with children to not pass that on.

 

 Welcome to another web edition of thinking out loud, and I'm your host, E. L. Pleasant. Thinking out loud, Colby Tanner spent a few months trying to get to know blacks and understand us as a race because he spent some time campaigning for a man that has our color but not our demeanor.  This in turn inspired him to write a book about his revelation called, Some of My Best Friends Are Black.” Okay it was a bad joke.  Really it is a bad joke.  The people that he met and spoke with was nothing more than a pet project to him and now he thinks he knows everything that he needs to know when it comes to us.  Like he said in his own words that he didn’t know any blacks, has never considered one of as a friend or cared to when he thought about it.   If you were to ask him before his little adventure into the wild he couldn’t tell you "which" black author that he enjoyed reading, too favorite song or group.  Why?  Because he never had to be bothered with us on a one to one or learned anything about us other than what the media wanted him to know and as they say, “the apple didn’t fall to far from the tree.” Therefore he is 37 years old and it’s like trying to ride a bike for the first time.  If you didn’t learn when you where younger do it really matter now?  So his kids will be taught the same way that he was and that cycle will continue.  If we had our own this and that, many of these problems of yesterday that we are facing would exist and we have no one to blame but ourselves because even as today we continue to allow these things to take place when we don’t equip our young with the knowledge of who they really are, where they come from and what we have done we can do again.  Our blacks are not taught black history, and about all the other great books that are available for their starving minds that want to know their past are greatly related to their future.  Is it because most of them say, leave it in the past it's just too boring or painful?  We on the other hand are force to put up with them and our own that are too ignorant and don’t know why.  For THINKING OUT LOUD, I'M E. L. PLEASANT

 

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