The Color Line in Your Den

Today, before you settle down to watch the Super Bowl, make sure you visit the bathroom and grab your beer and chicken wings, because the companies paying a record $2.4 million for each 30-second advertisement during the game won’t want you to miss a single one.

No doubt a few of them will feature groups of guys (and even some women) sitting around the den, doing exactly what you’re doing: eating, drinking, joking around, watching the game. Of course, these folks are wittier than most of us, and maybe a little bit better-looking too. But, otherwise, watching those ads is like looking in the mirror.

With one big difference.

Most of these ads will include both African Americans and white people, and occasionally other races, hanging out together, rooting for the home team.

There’s an easy camaraderie on the screen, based on what looks like real friendship. These images, however appealing, do not reflect the reality in most of our homes.

The happy TV picture of integration is also mirrored in the game itself. Black and white players (or, in baseball, black, white, Latino and even a few Asian players) work together toward a common purpose, their loyalties and ours determined not by the color of their skin but by the color of their uniforms. During the Super Bowl you can expect black Bostonians to root as loudly and unreservedly for Tom Brady and Adam Vinatieri as white Philadelphians will for Donovan McNabb and Brian Westbrook.

Some public venues, like many workplaces and shopping malls, are fairly well integrated too. But our neighborhoods, places of worship and social circles remain segregated. If you invited some neighbors over to watch the Super Bowl with you, the chances are high that all those folks will be the same race as you.

In fact, in the Boston and Philadelphia regions, black and whites live almost entirely in different neighborhoods. In each place, more than two-thirds of the population would have to move somewhere else for the neighborhoods to become fully integrated – that is, for the percentages of blacks and whites to reflect their numbers in the population as a whole.

The same is true of many of our nation’s largest metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Newark, Miami, Cleveland, New Orleans and Birmingham.

In a recent poll by Ladies Home Journal, only one in six readers reported having a good friend from another racial group. More than nine in 10 married white and black Americans have same-race spouses. And on it goes.

So don’t be fooled. Just as few of us run like Corey Dillon or have physiques like Terrell Owens, our daily experience of America’s racial divide is a world away from the playing field or those alluring ads. We have a long way to go to bring that world and our day-to-day reality closer together.