Tanner Colby woke up one day to the uncomfortable fact that he didn’t have any black friends. A self-described “average, middle-class, white guy,” Colby queried his fellow liberal (and white) friends, and discovered the same was true for them.
The realization came as somewhat of a shock. After all, it was fifty years ago this month that Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his vision of integration with these words: “I have a dream that one day... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”
There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way. But despite many good efforts and the passage of sweeping civil rights legislation, the truth is that in American society, black and white Americans in many cases just don’t spend that much time together. Indeed, a recent Reuters poll found that 40 percent of white people have only white friends.
How was that even possible? Colby wanted to know. In his book, Some Of My Best Friends Are Black, he explores the structures that prevent whites and blacks from hanging out together, even in today’s super-connected society.
What he discovered are persistent barriers to the integration of what he terms the “public square” – schools, neighborhoods, the workplace and places of worship. For his research, Colby returned to his native Louisiana to look at the history of school busing at his former high school. He also explored the history of residential segregation in Kansas City neighborhoods and examined the failure of affirmative action to integrate New York’s advertising industry – a field he, as a former ad executive, knows well. Finally, he took a close look at segregation in the church he grew up in.
If integration had worked and black people had gained access to mainstream avenues of opportunity, says Colby, then the areas where he lived, worked and worshipped would have provided ample scope for multiracial interaction. In his own experience that was not the case.
The personal and societal costs of segregation are high: “You grow up with a distorted view of the world, and you don’t understand society around you,” Colby said. “You live in this bubble where you pretend racism doesn’t exist and that can be damaging in its own way.”
Colby adds that integration is not just about getting along and learning how to understand each other but is, as Dr. King defined it, access to power and wealth. “Those opportunities are (still) squarely on the white side of the aisle in this country,” he says.
Colby agrees with President Obama who, in recent comments about the Trayvon Martin case, noted that each successive generation has made advances in terms of integration, and that “our kids seem to do better at this than we did.” He also agrees with the president that there is a long way to go to make ours “a more perfect union.” Dr. King would undoubtedly concur.
