Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood by Mark S. Fleisher (review)

Book Reviews 105 and their land and property repossessed by the mob that pushed them out at gunpoint. This is the remarkable story recounted in Don Faber’s new book, James Jesse Strang: The Rise and Fall of Michigan’s Mormon King. Faber’s biography pulls together primary sources and available scholarship to present a compelling history of the man and his unique abilities to build a vibrant, yet short-lived, religious community in the middle of Lake Michigan. A colorful character—to say the least—Strang has drawn the attention of both religious insiders and outsider scholars who have sought to understand his place in LDS history, Michigan history, and US religious history. At the outset of the book, Faber acknowledges the difficulty of uncovering the “real” Strang, who is often made into a caricature in either wildly hagiographical or hostile writings. As Faber explains, “I want to present the historical Strang stripped of myth, demonization, and popular fancy” (p. xii). To his credit, he achieves this goal through a careful sifting of extant materials and a balanced tone throughout the narrative. The author never takes a position on the legitimacy of Strang’s claims, rather “the final judgment is left to the reader” (p. xii). Beautifully written, Faber’s account brings one of Michigan’s most interesting citizens to life and explains the social and political context of the rise and fall of a religious king in antebellum America. Amy DeRogatis Michigan State University Mark S. Fleisher. Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Pp. 170. Notes. References. Paper: $29.95. Mark Fleisher’s Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood introduces the reader to central concepts in anthropology through the lens of one researcher’s personal experience. This eminently readable book has a compelling cadence which carries the reader from one snapshot of life in an American city to another and portrays a community at the mercy of systemic racism in the late 1990s. A descriptive account of relationships as encountered by the author serves to both illustrate and define the joys and sorrows of daily life in the north end of Champaign, Illinois, and the anthropologist’s ethnographic process is made transparent to the reader throughout. 106 The Michigan Historical Review Fleisher first arrived in the north end as an evaluator for a federallyfunded research project on youth gang suppression, intervention, and prevention. Living Black revolves around the relationship between the author and a local contact named Burpee who served as a bridge to this singular community which Fleisher came to know fondly. The changing nature of their relationship over the course of the ethnographic narrative reflects and amplifies the author’s deepening understanding of the larger community. As Fleisher becomes more enmeshed with the people and places central to the north end’s social landscape, he describes his dawning realization that the community did not, as might be expected, condemn pregnant teens, felons, poverty, or single-parent households. This understanding reveals a disconnect between the lived experience of the community and the judgments passed on the values and norms these realities represent to other facets of society. The condemnation so frequently levied in popular and political discourse stands in contrast to the lack of moral outrage surrounding these same tropes within the community itself. Such judgment is one mechanism which serves to reinforce the continuity of these realities, and the author glosses its absence within the community as one of “moral and ethical judgment” (p.23). Fleisher may note an absence of moral judgment as imposed by outsiders but soon locates judgment central to community values in other arenas such as loyalty and interpersonal reliability. This disjuncture is at the heart of structural inequality, a topic which is not directly addressed in the text but which underpins the narrative and seeps into every description of daily life and challenged assumptions. Reflective readers will go beyond the text to grapple with the challenge of overcoming culture-bound perspectives to better understand those with backgrounds different from one’s own. Living Black stands as an accessible introduction to ethnographic fieldwork, a window into a deeply textured community...