Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Read Free Book Online Page B

people would not be nice to me because of my race. But all of my experiences proved otherwise. I never had to be anything other than who I was. I think I was able to make as many friends as I did because I had a level of sensitivity that most teenagers don’t have, and I had that because I was black. There were skaters and jocks, and this group wouldn’t talk to that group—I never fell victim to those classifications, because I was so cognizant of being classified myself. I tried to learn everybody’s names, be friendly to everyone. I think if I hadn’t been black, I wouldn’t have been as popular as I was. I would have just done whatever the majority was doing.”
    Much like the self-assured girl in Sue Lovoy’s first class, Tycely crossed the color line so fast it never had a chance to hold her back. In a world without black people, it was her advantage to define what black was; we didn’t know. And if black meant Tycely, then black was pretty great. By the time we got to high school, Tycely says, she’d crossed so many lines and had so many friends that she’d neutralized whatever racial animus might have come her way. When pressed to dredge up all the racist things that had happened to her in Vestavia, she didn’t have much to offer. Racking her brain, she could really only come up with one, and then not even something directed specifically at her. “After a football game,” she recalls, “a bunch of Vestavia kids were hanging out, and of course I’m the only black kid. But we were playing Homewood, and Homewood had a lot of black guys on their team. And as they were walking back to their bus, this Vestavia kid said, ‘You know, I hate those niggers.’
    “Then one of the cheerleaders was like, ‘Oh my God, how could you say that in front of Tycely?’ Not ‘How could you say that?’ but ‘How could you say it
in front of Tycely
?’”
    To which the young man shrugged and offered the standard Southern defense, “What? She’s not like them.”
    “I dismissed it,” she says of the incident. “I just felt sorry for people. Itwasn’t their fault they were ignorant. I had a lot of kids say to me that I was the only black person they’d ever spoken to besides their maid. I’d invite friends over to visit, and they’d be
shocked
that I lived in a normal, regular house. They’d say, ‘My parents were really nervous for me to come over here.’ It wasn’t their fault their parents were so fearful and afraid—of what, I don’t know. Going to Vestavia is supposed to be all about getting this great education, but it’s not
really
about getting an education, because if your parents were concerned about giving you an education, they would educate you about the fact that there are black people who can read and write.”
    When
Brown v. Board
ruled that segregated educational facilities were harmful, the court’s decision focused almost exclusively on the psychological damage segregation caused to black children, the feelings of inferiority they developed by being stigmatized as second-class citizens and lesser human beings. Whites were assumed to be the healthy, well-educated norm. And because we were the norm, rarely did anyone stop to ask, “How is segregation screwing up the white kids?”
    The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.
    Vestavia was seriously serious about education. Less than twenty years after bolting from the overcrowded classrooms of the county, our high school had risen to become, arguably, the best public school in the state. In 1991, the U.S. Department of Education officially designated us a Blue Ribbon School; some people came from Washington and gave us a flag.
    But Tycely’s right: if education were really the goal, how good could our education have been if we weren’t actually educated about this integration thing in which
we
were supposedly the key players? Our history textbooks had improved since the days of Charles Grayson Summersell, but barely. The entire civil