Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

in America is getting better or worse. It doesn’t work, because racial balance can never illustrate how much of the problem is white people being racist and how much of the problem is black people having lots of good reasons for not wanting to hang out and play Scrabble with us. White resistance and black reticence are hopelessly entwined with each other, endlessly variable from situation to situation. No spreadsheet has yet been invented that can tell us where one leaves off and the other picks up.
    This much became obvious when I started looking at the racial balance in Vestavia Hills. The math didn’t add up. In the late 1980s, housing discrimination in suburban neighborhoods remained a serious problem. Home prices inflated by property taxes also made for a steep barrier to entry. But at that point Birmingham had had its first black mayor, Richard Arrington, running a powerful black political machine, the Jefferson County Coalition, for at least a decade. The city’s black middle class was substantial and growing. And yet in my graduating class at what was arguably the best public school in the state, only two black families had children who were fully, socially integrated into the student body: Tycely Williams and Chad Jones. And only one student—one, out of thousands—actually lived inside the district. That was Chad, the son of a single mom who worked the late shift. I know Vestavia’s racist, but it’s not
that
racist. Which begs the question: in a city with a large black population and a substantial black middle class, if a single black mother working the late shift could move into Vestavia, stay in Vestavia, and see her son graduate as one of the most popular students at Vestavia… where was everybody else?
    “Most black people in Birmingham wanted to be around other black people,” Tycely Williams says. “They wanted to live around black people, worship with black people, go to stores that were owned by black people.”
    After all the struggle to eliminate Jim Crow in the most segregatedcity in America, the black middle class, those with the means and opportunity to cross the color line, elected not to. They wanted the
right
to cross it. They wanted legal equality, access to public resources, and socioeconomic progress, but by and large very few crossed over in the meaningful sense of choosing to live, work, and play on the other side. And with good reason. White people didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat. And other than the good schools, life in Vestavia didn’t seem to offer much besides angry neighbors and a Chuck E. Cheese. Staying in Birmingham’s black community, on the other hand, offered family, community, pride of ownership.
    “Sixth Avenue Baptist Church was the crown jewel in the black religious community,” Tycely explains. “All of the Who’s Who in the black community went to Sixth Avenue. You had large social networks that people had built around the sororities, fraternities, and alumni groups of the historically black universities: Tuskegee, Alabama A&M, Alabama State. Those kinds of clubs and affinity groups connected people socially. Aside from that, maybe the biggest factor on the political front was the Jefferson County Coalition. There were a lot of professional folks who were members of that. And that association did a lot of things; it wasn’t just politics. They had their hands in everything. If you owned a black business and you were trying to get money out of city hall, you were trying to get in with that group.”
    The affinity for these black institutions didn’t die just because the doors to Vestavia were opened. On the contrary, because Vestavia was seen as so hostile and so unwelcoming, middle-class blacks turned their backs on it—pointedly refused to have anything to do with it. For education, they turned to the best options the city had to offer, schools with solid academics but a strong enough black presence to be culturally comfortable. There was the