Atwood +Andy Atwood, PC

To my amazement, I just learned that I grew up in an overtly and legally racist community.

My discovery came while reading Tanner Colby’s book, Some of My Best Friends are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America. This is a book full of stories about the ups and downs of integration as told and re-told by a white guy who grew up in Birmingham and moved to Madison Avenue. Colby has successfully written biographies on John Belushi and Chris Farley and demonstrates wit in this current book that serves to lighten the load.

I found the stories in Some of My Best Friends are Black to be fascinating, self-revelatory, deeply challenging, and amazingly hopeful… in the end.

Levittown, Long Island. I lived there from age 2 to 10, from 1951 to 1959. My father was the pastor of the Levittown Community Church. It was a community where blacks were not allowed to live – legally, not allowed. Such communities existed across the country and the history of that practice can be found in Part 2, “Planning for Permanence,” of Colby’s book. My best friend during those years was Bobby Benjamin, white and Jewish. All the kids were white and that was all I knew. Now, shockingly, I know more of my own history.

The story of integration in our shared land is a story of great struggle on everyone’s part. In Part 3, “Why do black people drink Hawaiian Punch?” Colby quotes Roy Eaton, who was the author of many a radio and TV jingle that folks my age will recall. He is a classical musician and the first black to have a major position in the advertising world. “Ultimately,” Eaton says, “The solution has to come from the level – the only level – that is of any significance, and that is the consciousness with which we view this world. It goes beyond these surface things of a white agency or a black agency, integrated or not. These things are just flotsam and jetsam, coming from a root-level malaise in the value system of the nation. That is where the change has to occur.” P. 222. Those of you who know my appreciation for Adult Development and Spiral Dynamics in particular will appreciate how Eaton’s position resonates with mine.

I do believe that we all come from the same source, the same energetic field that I have come to call God. From there we separate and individuate, only – and eventually – to rise up to a new level of differentiated and integrated consciousness

Atwood +Andy Atwood, PC

where our Oneness is expressed in Our Unique Self among all others. E Pluribus Unum.

Perspective. If you would like to have a broader perspective on an issue that accompanies we humans, I recommend the very readable book, Some of My Best Friends are Black.