words.

for your consideration...

"White people are products of their own whitewashed, sanitized environment. Black people have been systematically excluded from white neighborhoods. Black stories rarely surface in popular culture. The history of race in high school textbooks has been boiled down to a handful of bedtime stories about Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. Try to tap into the average white person's feelings on race and you won't necessarily find feelings of hate and antipathy. You just won't find much of anything, no fully formed or well-considered thoughts about race of any kind. There's nothing really there. Even white people who want black friends don't know where to start.

America's lack of integration wouldn't be such a big deal except for the fact that relationships and social networks are vital to economic advancement.

Even when programs like school busing and affirmative action give black people access to white spaces, when those people go to climb the social ladder there's nothing there for them to grab onto, because there's very little reciprocal effort coming from the other direction. It's high effort and low reward.

The result is that black people end up with integration fatigue. Many black writers responded to the Reuters poll with essays on why they didn't want white friends, and didn't need them. White friends weren't worth the bother.

This is their prerogative, but ultimately, it's to society's disadvantage because white people control the access to, well, just about everything. If you don't have white friends, you might have a decent job and a comfortable life, but all the doors of opportunity in this country are not open to you. "I may do well in a desegregated society," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society."

Interracial friendships, social bonds across the color line, are a key factor in putting the sins of America's past behind us. But it's not something that's accomplished by white people knowing lots of black people. It helps if white people know how to be better white people."

CNN: Why don't you have any black friends?