Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

Tanner Colby covers a lot of ground in this fascinating non-fiction book about American society: race, integration, white flight, red lining, the advertising industry, even church. But more than anything, he seeks to find why white people and black people in America just don’t hang out with each other. Colby begins the book with his excitement about the candidacy of Barack Obama, and how many of his friends also shared that optimism and excitement. But he also took a moment to reflect that neither he, nor his friends, had any friends who were black. And he sought a deeper reason for why that is.

Colby started with a bit of his own history. He grew up in Birmingham, the city of the famous civil rights marches. There, he investigated how Birmingham schools rapidly changed, how whites seemingly ran for the suburbs, and the impact of busing as a method of integration. Next, Colby looks at Kansas City, Missouri, and the vast impact real estate developer J.C. Nichols had on both K.C. and the nation. Nichols was responsible for both creating exclusive whites-only neighborhoods as well as the idea of “red lining,” where certain parts of the map were drawn in red lines as boundaries for where the ‘bad’ (black) neighborhoods were. In Kansas City, the street named Troost has another name, The Berlin Wall, where residents in neighborhoods to the west get loans, credit, and cheaper insurance rates, and residents to the east get virtually nothing. The impacts are staggering, and Kansas City is just an example of the nation as a whole.

Colby also looks at the lack of integration in the advertising industry, a business that few black students ever consider as a profession. In the later part of the book Colby travels back to his birthplace in the swamps of Louisiana, the only place in the world where the Catholic Church has ever had separate churches for blacks and whites. They’re still there.

Most books I review are from the young adult market. Some of My Best Friends Are Black is not a title I would hand to the average freshman or sophomore high schooler simply looking for something new to read, although some would enjoy it. The topics and history covered here are certainly something that are worth discussing.  I found the book fascinating and informative, even captivating and very important. But a young adult thriller it is not. Colby backs his findings with mounds of research and numbers, which are vital for building a reasoned argument. As an adult reader, it’s compelling. To a standard high school ninth grade English class, it would be a tough sell. Upper level IB (international baccalaureate) or AP history and English students would have fascinating discussions over this book. I highly recommend Some of My Best Friends are Black to college students and adults. Not everyone will like it; Colby clearly presents some history that will make some people angry, and others very uncomfortable. But hopefully it will start a discussion about why whites and blacks just don’t hang out very much, which is pretty much the basis for the book in the first place.