In interviews in cities and towns across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Madison to Dallas, members of 40 black and white pairs of friends reflect on how they became friends, how racial issues are addressed, and how their friendships have influenced their views and, in some cases, their actions. Utilizing a sociological framework to examine the friendships, Korgen offers readers a rare glimpse into an even rarer phenomenon and sheds light on important aspects of race relations in America. How do close friendships between blacks and whites develop? Why are cross-racial friendships so rare? How do these friendships navigate the issue of race? Crossing the Racial Divide answers these questions through a lively discussion of the problems and issues and through the voices of members of cross-racial friendships. In interviews in cities and towns across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Madison to Dallas, members of 40 black and white pairs of friends reflect on how they became friends, how racial issues are addressed, and how their friendships have influenced their views and, in some cases, their actions. Utilizing a sociological framework to examine the friendships, Korgen offers readers a rare glimpse into an even rarer phenomenon and sheds light on important aspects of race relations in America. Challenging both the traditional notion that blacks and whites are opposites and the increasingly popular notion of colorblindness, the author reveals that, while close black/white friendships follow the concept of homophily, we cannot just wish away the tensions and disparities that exist between most white and black Americans. Cross-racial friendships provide a unique perspective that makes racism and racial separation both more visible and more vulnerable. Put into sociological context, the stories revealed in this book make evident the institutional barriers existing between most black and white Americans and offer insight into the means to dismantle them.

A black minister and a white businessman candidly discuss the obstacles, stereotypes, and sins that inhibit interracial reconciliation. Provocative and honest.

The book recounts my struggles and suffering under colonial oppression in Southern Africa (Rhodesia). It exposes a vicious cycle of racial hatred perpetrated against black people by white supremacists on my homeland and abroad. I was discriminated and deprived of individual rights because of the color of my skin. In education, I was segregated and confronted with conflicting irreconcilable cultural and social values from the West. I was denied equal justice and access to education with restricted freedoms to choose where to live, assemble, or who to marry and associate with. Through a series of unfortunate political events and circumstances, I took up arms and fought for freedom in my homeland. I was imprisoned and persecuted for sedition and was accused of political treason without due process. During this period, I found sanctuary in my American and Canadian teachers, who catapulted me to study science at American universities in California. Even then, I continued to suffer the horrors of racism implicitly imbedded in white America. Remarkably, I would also find love and support across racial lines, and I was blessed with two beautiful biracial children born in America. With the passage of time, I came to terms with my difficult past and began to heal from the indelible wounds of racism. With renewed hope for freedom in America, I harnessed the healing power of love and forgiveness across racial barriers. Sadly, my dreams were unpredictably shattered by the death of my twenty-seven-year-old daughter in an auto accident, leading me to question the meaning and purpose of life on this cosmic journey of existence.

Having graduated from a small, private, and predominantly white college in 1977, I thought I was highly educated. After all, I had graduated magna cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa had taught me the secret handshake. I began teaching, confident in my knowledge. For the first few years of my thirty-five-year career, I taught higher level English courses composed mostly of white students. Even though there was a great diversity in my high school, I never questioned why there were so very few black students in my class. Where were they? Then my schedule changed, and I crossed the hall to teach African American Literature. My new students were all black. I am all white. My true education began with those steps across a hall.

A masterful narrative—with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating—Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb—it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way. In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity? The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore's hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out. This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.

Do you notice racial inequalities (in education, income, housing, incarcerations) and feel the related tensions (in politics, social media, church, friendships) and even know some of the history (supremacy, slavery, segregation) but struggle to grasp why race continues to divide America? Curtis Chesney wrestled with that question for years. As a skeptic, he wanted concrete answers. And as a White man, he needed to face disturbing truths, including slavery on his ancestors' farm--injustice committed by Chesney men. So he dug through the parallel histories of his family and his nation, uncovering roots of today's racial division across several centuries of inequity in America. Chesney's findings forever changed his perspective on our past, deepened his understanding of our present, and clarified his hopes for our future.