Some of My Best Friends Are Black:
The Strange Story of Integration in America
by
Tanner Colby
Per Slate:
In the summer of 2008, Tanner Colby, whose book The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts had recently made the New York Times
best-seller list, watched, donated money to, and generally celebrated
Barack Obama’s presidential bid. As he cheered the man who would become
America’s first black president, he realized that he didn’t know any
black people—not well enough to have visited their homes, at least. So
he set out to discover why that was. Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America
follows four stories—the history of busing, housing policy, affirmative
action in the workplace, and Louisiana’s segregated Roman Catholic
parishes—to explore how the legal barriers of Jim Crow were replaced by
policies that maintained a separate and unequal status quo.
