Who cares? This is why CNN is so low in the ratings.
Why don't you have any black friends?
updated 7:46 AM EDT, Mon August 19, 2013
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- A recent Reuters poll shows that 40% of white Americans have zero nonwhite friends
- Tanner Colby: I get asked a lot, "So, how many black friends do you have now?"
- He says some people see black friends as things to be acquired to prove one is not racist
- Colby: Social bonds across the color line are critical to a truly integrated society
Editor's note: Tanner Colby is the author of "Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America."
(CNN) -- "So, how many black friends do you have now?"
It's a question I get
asked a lot, ever since I set out five years ago to find out why I, your
typical middle-class white person, had no black friends at all.
I do have black friends
now, actually. Several. But I rarely offer that information when asked,
because to ask white people how many black friends they have is to pose
the wrong question.
Recently, a Reuters poll
came out showing that 40% of white Americans have zero nonwhite
friends, and only 20% of white Americans have five or more nonwhite
friends. People seemed shocked that the numbers were so bad.
Tanner Colby
Personally, I was
surprised that they were so good. America remains a deeply segregated
and divided country. Even accounting for institutional and socioeconomic
barriers, in the places we have the opportunity to integrate—the high
school cafeteria, for instance—we largely don't.
The Reuters survey itself
is misleading, lumping all minorities together under the vague heading
of "nonwhite." Depending on what part of the country you live in (e.g,
anywhere but Minnesota or Wyoming), it's not uncommon to have Asian or
Hispanic friends.
But the social divide
between whites and those groups is more a function of the slow-rolling,
generational process of immigrant assimilation. That is a wholly
different phenomenon from the social divide between whites and blacks,
which is the product of 400 years of slavery and segregation. That's the
social divide we should worry about, and if the poll had focused on
that, the numbers would surely have been much worse.
The reason why "How many
black friends do you have?" is such a terrible question is because it
shows how we typically talk when we talk about race. Even when we try to
talk about race in a constructive way, we usually make black people the
object of the sentence, rarely the subject.
Black friends are the
things to be acquired to prove one is not racist. The way the question
is asked accords black people no agency, nor does it reveal anything
about the real character of the white person being queried.
What you really want to
know is not "How many black friends do I have?" but rather, "Have I
become the type of individual that a black person might choose to be
friends with?" That's a real question. Poll a couple thousand white
people with that and you might start to get some interesting answers, or
at least some confused and befuddled looks.
White people are
products of their own whitewashed, sanitized environment. Black people
have been systematically excluded from white neighborhoods. Black
stories rarely surface in popular culture. The history of race in high
school textbooks has been boiled down to a handful of bedtime stories
about Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. Try to tap into the average white
person's feelings on race and you won't necessarily find feelings of
hate and antipathy. You just won't find much of anything, no fully
formed or well-considered thoughts about race of any kind. There's
nothing really there. Even white people who want black friends don't know where to start.
America's lack of
integration wouldn't be such a big deal except for the fact that
relationships and social networks are vital to economic advancement.
Even when programs like
school busing and affirmative action give black people access to white
spaces, when those people go to climb the social ladder there's nothing
there for them to grab onto, because there's very little reciprocal
effort coming from the other direction. It's high effort and low reward.
The result is that black
people end up with integration fatigue. Many black writers responded to
the Reuters poll with essays on why they didn't want white friends, and didn't need them. White friends weren't worth the bother.
This is their
prerogative, but ultimately, it's to society's disadvantage because
white people control the access to, well, just about everything. If you
don't have white friends, you might have a decent job and a comfortable
life, but all the doors of opportunity in this country are not open to
you. "I may do well in a desegregated society," the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. said, "but I can never know what my total capacity is until I
live in an integrated society."
Interracial friendships,
social bonds across the color line, are a key factor in putting the
sins of America's past behind us. But it's not something that's
accomplished by white people knowing lots of black people. It helps if
white people know how to be better white people.
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