Strange Fruit

How multi-racial is your circle of friends? Are any of your close friends of a different race than yours? Not the lady who works down the hall from your office or the dad you chat with while waiting for your kid to get out of school. Someone who's been to your house or invited you over for dinner. A recent poll by Reuters found that the many white people - 40% - have no friends outside their race. We on Strange Fruit figure this is probably no surprise to black folks. Among people of color, 25% of respondents said they didn't have friends outside their race. We wanted to talk more about the reasons why this might be the case, and what historical and demographic factors created the situation. So we spoke to Tanner Colby, author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America. Tanner realized while volunteering for Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 that he actually had no black friends. So he went on a cross-country research trip to examine interracial friendship, and on this wee