Some of My Best Friends are Black

Some of My Best Friends are Black (2013), a nonfiction book by Tanner Colby, is an examination of the state of racial integration in America more than five decades after the civil rights movement and landmark legal cases that eliminated legal segregation policies.

In the preface, Colby states that he was inspired to work on the book after the 2008 presidential election when he realized that after voting for Barack Obama he had no black people in his social circle. He wondered why it seemed that America was still so racially segregated. He admits that as a white man in America his sole qualification for writing such a book is ignorance.

He begins his exploration by going back to his grammar school in Birmingham, Alabama, the same school district where the test case for the famous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education was fought. He recalls his own childhood there and how the school, though officially desegregated, was still voluntarily segregated—the black kids sat together at lunch, as did the white kids. He introduces  Alicia Thomas, who drives a bus for the Vestavia Hills school district. The school is a very good one; she attended herself, bussed in as part of the racial desegregation program, but had since moved out of the busing zone and could not afford to live in Vestavia Hills itself. However, all children of employees of the school can attend, so the job was appealing for her.



Colby traces the history of Vestavia Hills and the school district, from the eccentric millionaire who founded the town, through the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that forcibly integrated the school. This led to busing, which brought black students to Vestavia’s schools for the first time. He discusses how the school slowly re-segregated, using loopholes in the law to let minority teachers retire without replacing them and other legal tricks. Colby reflects on how he and his own classmates treated the few black kids who attended when he was in school, noting that they were not abused but were treated as exceptions, as curiosities.

Colby turns his attention to larger schemes for legal segregation, focusing on the real estate industry and the secret ways it sought to maintain separate, affluent all-white neighborhoods and poorer black neighborhoods in various areas of the country. He discusses the practice of ‛blockbusting’ wherein realtors would stoke fear in white residents that black families would soon be moving into their neighborhoods, prompting owners to sell their valuable homes at a discount in order to flee. He also looks at the practice of ‛redlining,’ wherein financial and other services would either be denied or overpriced for minorities in order to discourage them from buying homes or otherwise further integrating into society. He examines the efforts by Kansas City to integrate its neighborhoods in light of these secretive practices that countered all such efforts.

Colby reflects on his own career as a copywriter in the advertising industry. He explores the history of advertising and race relations, noting that Madison Avenue had been one of the most resistant industries to integration, hiring minorities only when the external pressure from civil rights groups became unbearable. He then explains that these firms often had no idea how to use the talents of these minorities and made little effort to figure it out, prompting most of these new hires to leave the white firms and found all-black advertising firms, thus re-enforcing segregation in the advertising business. Colby notes that these ‛voluntary’ segregations did not violate any laws, but set back the goal of integrating the country racially.



On a more hopeful note, Colby explores the history of a Catholic parish in Louisiana and the history of segregated churches in general. While the fact that even religions and local churches remained largely segregated is initially depressing, he notes that in the specific case of the Louisiana parish there is hope. For generations the church maintained separate black and white congregations; over time this was more or less accepted as the way it was, both sides distrusting the motivations of the other. Slowly, with immense effort, the church combined the congregations; in the modern day, the church is fully integrated, with unified services and no more separate masses or other ceremonies.

Colby ends the book on a hopeful but realistic note, painting a picture of a country that no longer legally enforces segregation but voluntarily pursues it out of a mixture of tradition, fear and xenophobia, and longstanding but largely invisible economic practices that prevent minorities from truly advancing in society. His own revelation about his lack of racial integration in his own life stands as a hopeful possibility that others may embark on similar personal journeys.