Black in White Space

In Black in White Space, Elijah Anderson chronicles moments in which Black people are jarringly and often violently treated as outsiders-- a birder in Central Park, a jogger in a rural Georgia town, or a college student lounging on an elite university quad. Anderson shows that due to expansions in racial equality over the past fifty years, Black Americans increasingly gain access to elite white spaces. But instances of discrimination and harassment serve to remind us that racial barriers are firmly entrenched-- for the elite, the middle-class, and the poor alike. Anderson also delves into the stratifications and stereotypes that have made black and white spaces so persistently separate and difficult to break through, showing that regardless of the social or economic position of a Black person, the stereotype of the iconic ghetto looms in the white imagination, associating all Black people with crime, drugs, and poverty. From conversations on the street corners of Philadelphia with Black men who can't get work to Anderson's own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he gathers a wealth of stories to shed new light on the urgent and dire persistence of racial discrimination in the United States--