We all know that advertising is a big con to get us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. It works on us anyway. Ads work because they’re aspirational. They tap into some unsatisfied desire and then sell you the solution for it. Buy this product, take it home, and you’ll be safer, happier, and more attractive. And therein lay the root of the industry’s problem with race, both in the office and on the airwaves. If advertising is aspirational, who in the 1950s aspired to be black?
Tanner Colby — Some of My Best Friends Are Black:  The Strange Story of Integration in America

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I have just finished reading Tanner Colby’s Some of My Best Friends Are Black.  I have read many books on race relations and the history of the “civil rights” struggle.  And, I present my synopses of these books at the Urban Engagement Book Club for CitySquare.  I am presenting my synopsis of this terrific book today (May 16, 2013).

Here’s my impression:  this is my new “this is the book to read” book  on race relations in America.  It is not quite history, though there is plenty of history.  It is not academic, though it is filled with facts and details.  It is a flowing narrative that is engaging, and painful, and yet ends with some hope.  (Tanner Colby is a terrific storyteller!)  Mr. Colby did an exceptional job capturing the human element of this long-term struggle.  Consider this, from the book:

“Integration was devastating for that first generation of black children…”
“In black schools, they’d had teachers that cared. Now white teachers had no idea what they were dealing with, and the black kids were just passing through, unattached. No nurturing.”

The book is told in four separate, substantive narratives:

#1 — the story of Vestavia (outside Birmingham), with details about busing, integration, and the impact of these practices on neighborhoods.
#2 – the account of the Kansas City real estate genius, who also happened to be the real father of “Racial Covenants,” – J. C. Nichols (who, by the way, provided the model for Hugh Prather’s vision of Highland Park, here in the Dallas area – as he did for many other developments across the country).
#3 – the difficulty black people have had in making it in advertising.
#4 – the noble, and now somewhat successful attempt, to achieve genuine black-white equality in church, as revealed in the story of one congregation’s attempt.

Mr. Tanner is a witty, funny writer – dropping in humor, and unexpected jewels, in the midst of an overwhelming amount of pain and ugliness.  His first two books (which I have not read) are on John Belushi and Chris Farley.  So, this was an “unexpected” next project.  He wrote:

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.

Here are 11 observations from my reading of the book, which I include in my handout for my synopsis:

1)  The busing mandate — in order to facilitate integration — led to:  the closing of good black schools (some, better schools than some white schools kept open); the (mass) movement into private schools…
2)  Though the students ultimately had to be “in the classroom,” that did not mean they would be on the volleyball team or the debate team or the cheerleading squad.
3)  The (“white”) textbooks in the south made no mention of the Civil Rights movement…
4)  The black teachers and principles basically lost their jobs (or, in some cases, became janitors)…
5)  The practice of “nullification” has been alive and well all along.  In other words, federal laws were not followed.  They were ignored, skirted, over and over and over and over again…
6)  And, nullification was only part of it.  To get the laws passed, the laws were always watered down to get “something” passed…
7)  And, well intentioned laws had very counterproductive consequences.
8)  A brief legal history:
• Segregation
• Racial Covenants — Whites only – (first, individual deed; then, entire developments; then, “automatically renewed every twenty five years…”)
9)  Hope:  At a recent Vestavia basketball game, the black parents sit in one section, the white parents in another.  No interaction.  But!, their kids sit together…
     • Down in the student section, all the kids, black and white, are sitting with one another, laughing, fist-bumping, and generally having a blast.
            • Give partial (make that plenty of!) credit to the new white principal who banned the Confederate Flag
10)  Redlining may have been worse than segregation…  Redlining may have been the worst “tool” of racism of them all.
11)  Here’s a question for you – can you get pizza delivered to your house?

Do yourself a favor – read this book.  You will learn about real estate, the value of planned developments, a pretty fair amount about advertising – and, in the midst of it all, plenty of the story of race relations over the last 100 years, or so.