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But because they happen to be black, families like the Brookses are likely to encounter galling day-to-day insults that few whites will ever face. Blatant racism among whites may be a dwindling thing, but a less candid style of prejudice persists. The bank loan officer gives a cool reception to black customers regardless of their credit rating. Shop security guards treat middle-aged black shoppers like suspected thieves. Health clubs give black applicants the runaround. Even the FBI, which is charged with investigating complaints about discrimination, has had its difficulties. Last week its director, William Sessions, ordered sweeping changes in the bureau's affirmative-action program after findings that there had been discrimination against black and Hispanic agents.
The most affluent African Americans still have difficulty buying homes wherever they want to live. The suburbs are dotted with gilded ghettos such as Chicago's Chatham neighborhood and North Portal Estates in Washington, middle- class and upper-middle-class areas from which whites fled when blacks began to arrive in large numbers. A study by two University of Chicago researchers, Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton, shows that middle-class blacks are significantly less likely than Hispanics or Asian Americans to live among whites -- so much so that an Asian or Hispanic with a third-grade education is more likely to live in an integrated neighborhood than a black with a Ph.D.
Real estate agents still frequently steer black buyers away from white areas. So-called redlining, in which banks and mortgage institutions proscribe lending in certain neighborhoods, also remains a common practice. Two years ago, when Michael Lomax, chairman of the Fulton County, Ga., board of commissioners and a candidate to be the next mayor of Atlanta, applied for a home-improvement loan, he was turned down at two local banks before he got his money at a third one. A subsequent investigation by the Atlanta Journal- Constitution discovered that banks had redlined the plush but mostly black Adams Park residential area where Lomax lives, though an average home is valued at $200,000.
As a boy in Mississippi, says Clifton Taulbert, "I was taught to look down, not to look into white people's eyes." Somewhere along the line, Taulbert, 44, started looking up. A former marketing manager for the Tulsa-based Bank of Oklahoma, he is now co-owner of a parking facility near Tulsa International Airport. His partner in the venture, Fine Airport Parking, is a white college friend, Michael B. Fine, who invited Taulbert to join him after he started the business five years ago. Says Taulbert: "I had an expertise that he needed. Period. Race has never entered into things."