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

Colby, Tanner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067002371X ISBN 13: 9780670023714

Publisher: Viking, 2012

Synopsis

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 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"I've often thought that the issue of race has been more than adequately dealt with by America's people of color and that it was finally white people's turn to engage with the uncomfortable subject if we were to move forward together as a nation. In Some of My Best Friends Are Black, Tanner Colby bravely and ably accepts the challenge. This book taught me unexpected and valuable lessons about my country, my people, and myself. What can a white guy named Tanner teach a black guy named Baratunde about race in America? Turns out the answer is 'plenty.'" -- Baratunde Thurston, author of How to be Black

"In weaving together the personal narratives (including his own) of "the Children of White  Flight" and "the Children of the Dream" Tanner Colby has crafted a powerful piece of social commentary and contemporary history. Hugely readable, quirky, and incredibly smart, Some of my Best Friends Are Black presents four unforgettable smaller stories to tell the big story of race in today's America." -- Tim Naftali, author of George H.W. Bush and director emeritus of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

"Irony, surprise, virtue, and hustling are always the interwoven story of ethnic troubles in America. Tanner Colby lets us see that, however many advances have been accomplished, the unfamiliar styles of those who intend to do well--along with those who inevitably pollute any area with short-sighted economic dreams--inevitably lead to a universal conclusion: "Mistakes were made." The story of how and why this happened is what gives this book something special beyond the usual sentimentality imposed on human events, above and below." -- Stanley Crouch, author of Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 067002371X
• ISBN 13: 9780670023714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320