My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White (review)

Using the past as both a mirror and a lamp, Andrew Furman’s new book crosses generic boundaries to help us see where we have been, where we are going, who we were, and who we have become. As personal memoir, sociological study, and journey narrative, My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White looks through the lens of Furman’s high school experience on a racially mixed basketball team to illuminate a community’s effort to integrate its schools many decades ago—and also probes the failure of that effort to relieve the social and economic effects of racial segregation. Within that general failure, however, Furman uncovers a rich and deep vein of personal benefit that redeems the effort even as he mourns its inadequacy.

The big surprise of this book is its power to engage me in the subject of basketball. Immunized in childhood by my own father’s adventures on the basketball, the handball, and the tennis courts—which kept us waiting for hours on Sundays while he finished one or another game before driving us to visit the grandparents—I found myself drawn in to Furman’s descriptions of his experience on that high school team. As he tries to recover the skills he needs to play in an alumni game, I could feel both the painful futility and the profound pleasure of the effort. That his sense of himself is so entangled with his struggle first to master and then to recover those skills first surprises: he is, after all, chair of an English department at an American university, husband, father, and author of several books. But his experience on the court and in training begins to appear in this book as the seed bed in which the roots of his mature accomplishments—and his adult self—were nourished. He understands the familiar givens of athletic experience: the “intense focus” demanded by play, the “competitive drive” and the power of “teamwork” that have become essential to his scholarly and professional work. These are what he calls “the simple gifts” of athletic experience.

More powerful, however, are the insights Furman develops into the access this sport has granted to people and a culture that would otherwise have been entirely closed to him. As he returns to Los Angeles to reunite with the African American players who were his teammates, he hears himself recovering the language they used together and begins to question himself: “Who is this me?” he asks, fully “embraced by Caucasia,” yet conversant with men who still live in “the hood.” Realizing during his short visit how little he really knows of those men’s lives, how few questions he asked when they played together in a school within his neighborhood but to which they traveled from the inner city, he feels “something close to shame.” However, he also begins to understand the power of even his limited experience with these teammates.

Embedded in a careful analysis of the social struggle to achieve desegregation in the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s and 1980s when Furman attended school there—and of the subsequent lapse back into defense of neighborhood schools that emphasize quality of education rather than integration, but that fail to address the still considerable gap in achievement between African American and Caucasian students—his insights become resonant. He studies particularly the resistance of Jewish parents in the Valley of the 1970s to the prospect of bussing their children to an inner city school, linking it to his own children who attend school in Florida with children who look like them. He mourns the “resurgent pattern of segregated education” that emerges from his study. He insists that “integrated classrooms and athletic fields and courts represent goods to pursue in their own right, and for all children,” even as he acknowledges the motives and fears that worked and still work against these “goods.”

For me, however, the gift of this book lies in the particular, personal discovery that he and his teammates...