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

by Tanner Colby

Overview

An irreverent, yet powerful exploration of race relations by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chris Farley Show

Frank, funny, and incisive, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, Tanner Colby explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, offices, and churches—the very places where social change needed to unfold. Weaving together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people—black and white—Colby reveals the strange, sordid history of what was supposed to be the end of Jim Crow, but turned out to be more of the same with no name. He shows us how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind—and how far all of us have left to go. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143123637
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/30/2013
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	691,391
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tanner Colby is the author of Belushi: A Biography and the New York Times bestseller The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Part 1 Letter from a Birmingham Suburb

1 Bus Kid 3

2 A Place Apart 9

3 Oreo 25

4 What Can Brown Do for You? 39

5 Go Rebels? 54

Part 2 Planning for Permanence

1 There Goes the Neighborhood 73

2 "Have You Seen the Country Club District?" 82

3 49/63 or Fight 101

4 Turf 115

5 Desirable Associations 128

Part 3 Why Do Black People Drink Hawaiian Punch?

1 The Old Boys' Network 143

2 Mad Black Men 150

3 A Whole New Bag 166

4 The Inescapable Network 187

5 What's Black About It? 208

Part 4 Canaan

1 The Race That Prays Together 225

2 The Strange Career of Jesus Christ 234

3 The Miracle of Grand Coteau 246

4 In the Wilderness 259

5 Milk and Honey 277

Author's Note 289

Editorial Reviews

In his latest, Colby (The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts) takes a fresh, honest look at race relations, tackling the issue in four realms: school, neighborhood, workplace, and church. He probes school integration’s turbulent history in Birmingham, Ala.—test case for Brown v. Board of Education, and also the place Colby went to high school. He visits his old school district to track its bumpy progress from racial homogeneity to integration and to find out whether the black kids and the white kids still sit at different tables in the lunchroom. In Kansas City, Mo., he uncovers how real estate practices like blockbusting, redlining, and racial covenants created ghettos and urban blight, and how one neighborhood group is fighting back. Then, a former adman himself, Colby returns to Madison Avenue to examine an industry still divided into mainstream white agencies and niche-market black agencies. Finally, he winds up in a Louisiana Catholic parish scarred by racial violence and learns how the church was able to overcome a self-segregation perpetuated by decades of silence and mistrust. Pointing out the shortfalls of court-ordered busing, affirmative action, and other well-intentioned programs, Colby’s charming and surprisingly funny book shows us both how far we’ve come in bridging the racial divide and how far we’ve yet to go. Agent: Peter McGuigan, Foundry Literary + Media. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Who would expect a coauthor of two Saturday Night Live alumni biographies (The Chris Farley Show; Belushi) to pen a thoughtful, judicious, yet provocative social history of American race relations? Colby quips that ignorance is his one qualification as a white writer on race, then gets serious in exploring four key areas: school desegregation (in Vestavia Hills, a suburb of Birmingham, AL), homeownership and neighborhood (in Kansas City's 49/63 area), advertising—as a career and a product (in Madison Avenue's old boys' network), and church membership (in Grand Coteau, LA). Colby considers the close connections among suburban development, advertising, and racial fear. His tour of Kansas City, still divided racially by one thoroughfare, underlines how years of misguided federal housing and loan policies institutionalized residential racial stratification. And he reveals how, after 40 years, 13 pastors, and untold strife, it took a hurricane and an ailing priest to integrate neighboring black and white Catholic parishes in one Louisiana town. VERDICT Evenhanded, felicitously written, and animated by numerous interviews, Colby's book is a pleasure despite its overall bleak message. It updates, with only slightly more hope, Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown's By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Library Journal

Colby (The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts, 2008) turns his attention to one of the most vexing and violent topics in American social history. With depressing persuasiveness, the author argues that we haven't achieved racial integration, because, well, we don't really want to. He looks at several social institutions--schools, real estate, advertising, churches--and finds just one faint glimmer of hope in a Catholic parish in Louisiana, a place where the separate black and white congregations, after decades of debate and nastiness, eventually merged. There is a personal dimension to most of the narrative. Colby visited the Alabama public school he attended as a child, and he looks closely at the case of Kansas City and its struggles to integrate some neighborhoods. A former copywriter, he examines Madison Avenue's glacial acceptance of blacks into the world of advertising, a process that's been both slow and icy. He also explores the irony of profoundly segregated Christian churches. School integration, he writes, came at enormous economic and psychological cost--and even in schools where both whites and blacks attend in large numbers, they tend to stay separate. Rapacious and amoral real-estate agents and complicit civic officials engaged for years in the gross practices of "red-lining" and "block-busting." Madison Avenue was clueless about how to sell to black markets and hired black personnel only under enormous pressure--and didn't know what to do with their new employees, many of whom left, some to establish all-black agencies. Intransigence and even violence have characterized attempts to blend church congregations; beneath it all flows a deep, turbulent river of white entitlement. Occasionally thick with statistics and explication, but the author's personal voice is compelling and his thesis is most disturbing. Recommended reading for anyone who still thinks we live in a post-racial America.

Kirkus Reviews