Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson’s book is a well-timed study of what the author theorizes as “White space” (3) and spaces in U.S. society in the post–Barack Obama era. Yet the advent of the election of Barack Obama, the first non-white U.S. president, holds no significance in the Anderson’s study, which takes up periods before and after. Across thirteen independent thematic chapters, a prologue, and a conclusion, Anderson’s book, which focuses mainly on the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, presents a very disturbing picture of group and race relations in twenty-first century United States in the public domain of everyday life.

Nearly sixty years since the post–World War II racial and social integration and incorporation efforts foundered, not only have key features of civil rights legislation been rescinded in Congress and by the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g., 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act), Anderson finds the persistence of visible and invisible public spaces dominated by established white law, media, business, institutions, neighborhoods, and ordinary individuals. Using a combination of ethnographic and sociological approaches, Anderson especially centers on the poor among the Black communities of Philadelphia with a concern to “document ethnographically the circumstances in which Black