Some of My Best Friends Are Black (2 page)

In May of 2008, I was lucky enough to do something most writers only dream about. I’d written a book,
The Chris Farley Show
, a biography of the
Saturday Night Live
star who died from a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three. It was published to great reviews, hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, and stayed there for four glorious, ego-massaging weeks. Then I was unemployed. I needed another book to write, but my sophomore publishing effort had proved to be as much a curse as a blessing. My previous book had been a biography of John Belushi, the
other
larger-than-life
SNL
star killed by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three. Everywhere I went people would say, “Huh. Dead, fat comedians? That’s what you do?”

I’d pigeonholed myself. I wasn’t interested in writing about dead, fat comedians anymore, and there weren’t many of them left, besides. But I wasn’t an authority on anything else. As far as the market was concerned, it was all I was qualified to do. Even my literary agent and my editor, sympathetic to my plight, advised me that the only kind of book I could sell was something in the ill-fated celebrity genre. I pitched my publisher a number of ideas in a different vein, all of them politely batted down. So like any unemployed person, I started watching a lot of television.

It was the summer of the 2008 presidential election. The twenty-four-hour news cycle was churning at full tilt, and I was glued to the drama. Hillary Clinton was desperately clinging to a primary campaign that was already mathematically over. John McCain was running around the country, rapidly shrinking before our eyes from a war hero “maverick” into some crotchety old dude. And there in between them was pretty much the awesomest guy ever to run for president in my lifetime, Barack Obama. I’ll admit it: I was totally in the bag for the Yes We Can crusade. I didn’t just
drink the Obama Kool-Aid. No, I sucked those flavor crystals right out of the packet. The speeches, the audacity—I bought all of it. My friends and I, we’d gather on Tuesday nights to drink and cheer as the primary results came in. For the first time in my life I gave money, and not a small amount of it, to a political candidate. The night he finally clinched the nomination, my friends and I all let out a collective
“Yes!”
But somewhere in all my excitement over America’s first black presidential nominee, I came to a not-small realization: I didn’t actually know any black people. I mean, I’ve met them, have been acquainted with a few in passing, here and there. I know
of
black people, you could say. But none of my friends were black. I’d never had a black teacher, college professor, or workplace mentor. I’d never even been inside a black person’s house. I knew it wasn’t just me. I started randomly polling friends and associates—most of them enlightened, open-minded, well-traveled, left-leaning white folks like me—asking them how many black friends they had. The answers were pretty pathetic.

“Um, I work with a black guy.”

“I had a biracial friend in high school.”

“I’ve got… one—wait… no, two! I’ve got two.”

“
Real
black friends? You mean ones that aren’t on television?”

By the time election season was done, it was pretty clear to anyone who was paying attention that there were black people supporting Obama and there were white people supporting Obama, but we were doing it the same way black people and white people do just about everything: in different zip codes. Even inside the big arenas, how many of those people cheered their candidate on only to return at the end of the night to separate homes, neighborhoods, and lives? Obama’s election was astonishing, unprecedented. But what did it really prove other than that it’s easier to vote for a black man than to sit and have a beer with one?

With a black president headed to the White House, every publisher in New York was being flooded with proposals for books about his candidacy and race and politics and the rest of it—all coming from authors, academics, and important people far more impressive than I. So I called my editor and told her I didn’t want to write a book about Barack Obama. I wanted to write a book about why I didn’t know any black people. I wanted to skip from dead, fat comedians to the history of racial integration
in America. There was no reason in the world for her to agree to let me do it. There was certainly no way she’d pay me actual money to do it. But my pitch was pretty simple. Sure, I had no idea what I was doing, but to be a white person writing a book about race, ignorance was the only qualification I would need.

Sold.

Once I sat down to work, one of the first things my memory dredged up was a date I’d been on a couple years before. I was seeing this young woman who worked in international humanitarian relief. A perky go-getter type, she had made it her dedicated mission to save all the starving children of Africa. On one of our earlier outings, when she was telling me about all her trips to Sudan, she shared one of the defining moments of her life, the thing that had spurred her in this calling to help save the world: the time she got to meet her hero, Nelson Mandela.

She’d been in college and had gone to South Africa to do research for her senior thesis on the history of Apartheid. Through a random connection she was invited to a smallish, intimate meeting where the former South African president was going to be. She told me she got to shake Mandela’s hand, look into his eyes, and tell him how his life and his struggle had inspired her so deeply.

“That’s great,” I said. “Did you tell him you belong to a restricted country club?”

Because she did. Or her parents did, anyway. She would use the membership when she was home, so same thing. Her brain froze for a few seconds after I’d said it. Then there was some nervous laughter.

The young woman and I are no longer together. But that’s not the point of the story. The point is that you don’t have to be crushing on Nelson Mandela during brunch at your restricted country club to live your life in a cloud of cognitive dissonance. When you’re white in America, life is a restricted country club by default, engineered in such a way that the problems of race rarely intrude on you personally. During the time of Jim Crow, it took a great deal of terrorism, fear, and deliberate, purposeful discrimination to keep the color line in place. What’s curious about America today is that you can be white and enjoy much of the same isolation and
exclusivity without having to do anything. As long as you’re not the guy dumb enough to get caught emailing racist jokes around the office, all you have to do is read about black people in the newspaper. And, really, you don’t even have to do that. Where you need a deliberate, purposeful sense of action is to go the other way, to leave the country club and see what’s going on out in the world. It also helps when a publisher agrees to pay you to do it.

This book is not a memoir. It’s dotted with a few anecdotes of mine here and there, but it’s not about me. Nothing has ever happened to me that anyone else would ever care to read about, ever. The only interesting thing about my life is that it’s not interesting at all. It’s the standard, white, middle-class American Dream—dating from the time when such a thing was taken for granted by standard American white people. My great-grandparents were Louisiana sharecroppers on my mother’s side and dirt-poor farmers from Texas on my dad’s. Neither of my grandfathers finished high school but both got steady working-class jobs—factory worker and flooring contractor—in the post–World War II economic boom. My mother and father were first in their families to go to college—state schools—becoming a teacher and an architect, respectively. From there, my brother and I were bootstrapped into good neighborhoods, the best schools, private universities, and rewarding careers. If neither of us is rich, it’s because we took the opportunities that weren’t about the money, which is its own form of luxury. There have been some ups and downs, but it’s mostly the story of things working out the way we tell everyone that America is supposed to work out.

My life becomes interesting only when you use it to compare and contrast. My peers and I came of age alongside a singular generation of black Americans: the Children of the Dream. Born in the late sixties and early seventies, they were the inheritors of a world without Jim Crow, vested with the hopes of all that their parents had fought and perhaps died for. Starting with the
Brown v. Board
decision that overturned the principle of separate but equal schooling, the civil rights movement overcame white hostility and resistance to pass landmark legislative victories that outlawed segregation in the voting booth, the workplace, and public accommodations. Starting in 1968 and 1969, busing and other school desegregation
plans were implemented to improve access to education. Fair housing laws were enacted to eliminate segregated neighborhoods. Sweeping federal mandates for affirmative action opened the doors for college admissions and job placement. The Children of the Dream were now supposed to get everything I got. Only it didn’t exactly happen that way.

From humble beginnings, my parents pole-vaulted into the middle class and started a family in the mid-1970s, right about the same time all the mechanisms of integration were allegedly working full-steam to give black families the same. Though born in Houston, Texas, I can’t really claim it as home. We moved around a good bit. From toddlerhood, I grew up mostly in the small town of Lafayette, Louisiana. I went to high school in Birmingham, Alabama, attended college in New Orleans, and have since spent my entire adult life in New York City. All of these places have substantial black populations. Yet my standard middle-class pipeline was then and is now virtually all white. As I sat around marinating in the 2008 election coverage, I figured that fact had to be illustrative of
something
. What, I didn’t really know. But to retrace the color line through all the places I’ve lived, I figured, would have to yield a pretty thorough catalog of the mistakes that were made in trying to take it down. And somewhere in that catalog of mistakes might be the answer to fixing them. That was my hunch, at any rate.

There is only one way to fit the subject of race into a single book. You cleave off the part you’re going to talk about and leave the rest for someone else. Otherwise you’ll never finish. So it’s worth starting off with a brief word about what this book is not.

Integration requires agency, some degree of social mobility. Any discussion of it tends toward those, black or white, with enough socioeconomic leverage to have options. So while this book explores life on both sides of the color line, most of it takes place on one side of the class divide. The ills that hobble the mobility of the underclass, and the gulf that separates the haves from the have-nots, is a related but separate set of issues.

The problem addressed here is the fact that the majority of black Americans are not poor, not any longer. In my generation more blacks have
graduated from college than at any other time in history, yet the social, cultural, and economic gaps persist. The unemployment rate for black college grads is double that of white college grads. Rich/poor, North/South, red state/blue state, the color line seems to follow us everywhere.

This is also not a book about politics or policy. The macropolitical history of race is well and thoroughly documented, even if we don’t actually bother to teach any of it in our schools. The landmark court decisions and government programs that have shaped the way we deal with race have been woven in where necessary for background, but most of the book is just stories about people—the accumulated experiences and reflections of some fascinating individuals who were generous enough to share them with me. Taken together, they make for a personal, ground-level view of history as it happened. They’re largely anecdotal, rarely objective, and hardly definitive. Which is the only way it can be, really. But as I found in the dead, fat comedian business, even where objective fact is elusive, if you cobble together enough honesty you usually end up somewhere close to truth.

While the stories of the people I met are all unique, I endeavored to shape them into something universally accessible. To that end, I didn’t write about integration in the military or in professional sports or in restricted country clubs—nothing that specific. I wanted to look at the everyday places where people should meet and interact, but don’t. Given the limits of word count and time, that boiled down to four major things: schools, neighborhoods, the workplace, and church. Everybody’s sat in the school cafeteria. We all live somewhere. Before the second Bush administration, most of us had jobs. And we all belong to something that serves as our church, whether that thing meets on Sunday morning or not.