In her book, Mary Pattillo sets out to lay to rest any notion that there is a unitary political agenda binding all blacks to a common political cause. She accomplishes this goal by thoroughly dismantling the well-worn but persistent myth of a “black community” that speaks in one voice. She is not the first to discredit that hoary notion, but her book is likely to become the most effective and influential work to do so. The main reason for this may be that she brings a subtlety to her argument that goes far beyond mere critique. Her analysis is both more nuanced and ultimately more positive than any previous statement in the literature.

By means of a meticulous field study conducted in the North Kenwood–Oakland area on the south lakeside of Chicago, Pattillo reveals that class stratification splits blacks on important issues. However, though she rejects the idea of a single black politics or black perspective, she emphasizes that “‘the black community’ is not retired in Black on the Block” (p. 3); instead, it is forged (and constantly recreated) in the engagement among blacks who inhabit (in this case) a common geographic space. She finds that middle-class blacks moved back in North Kenwood–Oakland “out of a sense of racial pride and duty, to be conduits of resources, to model ‘respectability’ ” (p. 3). The disputes between black of different backgrounds, incomes, and employment levels “are simultaneously debates over what it means to be black”; thus, race remains a “unifying social category fostering allegiances across class and similarities of worldviews and political attitudes” (p. 301).

Pattillo began her fieldwork in the North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhoods in 1998 when she bought a house and, soon after, became secretary of the Conservation Community Council. As she points out in the book's introduction, the two neighborhoods she studied are designated as conservation areas, established in state and federal laws to facilitate collaboration among professional planners, the city, foundation representatives, and local residents in the cause of revitalization. This classification distinguished North Kenwood–Oakland from nearby blighted areas because it was targeted for special resources and coordinated efforts; nevertheless, the main impulse for change was initiated not from outside the community but from within. Middle-class blacks became the intermediaries or bringing external resources and for initiating changes at the neighborhood level. As with gentrification in any context, local residents felt threatened by rising property values but not, in this instance, by racial displacement. Accordingly, the tensions between established residents and newcomers revolved around issues of class rather than race.

It was not always so. As background for understanding the contemporary demography and politics of North Kenwood–Oakland, Pattillo traces the history of the two neighborhoods by recounting the history of her own house at 4432 South Berkeley Avenue. This strategy works marvelously as a literary device because it gives a sense of texture and even intimacy to her account. The stately stone house was built in 1891 in an aristocratic commuter suburb (later annexed), and over the decades the people who lived in it witnessed the neighborhood's transitions. Though better told than most, the story contains the familiar elements of racial violence, protracted resistance by whites, the transition from white to black, and the decline into physical decline and poverty. In much of the urban literature, the latter state serves as the denouement for a familiar narrative; for Pattillo, it is the beginning of a fascinating period in which middle-class blacks begin moving back to share turf with “slum” residents, and in the process redefine the nature of the black community of North Kenwood–Oakland.

The author's account of the political issues that this demographic change has wrought is carefully analytical but, at the same time, straightforwardly personal. As a participant in the processes she describes, she cannot pose as a disinterested bystander, and does not try to. She describes herself as “one of the middle-class brokers who mean well in their efforts to bring resources and services to a poor black neighborhood,” and who, as a consequence, must “traverse the space between the often unharnessed power of poor and working-class black old-timers and the highly organized machine, or ‘white power,’ of elected officials, philanthropists, businessmen, and developers.” She confesses that “I am caught in the middle as well, alternatively refusing, fumbling with, and wielding the master's tools” (p. 146–147).

In a nutshell (for it is not possible, in a brief review, to give a detailed account of the controversies), middle-class blacks have been guided by an interest in property values, social respectability, good services and amenities, a low crime rate, and the other elements that define a high quality of life. She traces the way in which these values have sometimes pitted middle-class professionals against lower-income blacks in the educational system and in battles over public housing and measures to deter crime. By decentering the cleavage of race in her analysis, she is able to offer a refreshing, subtle, and very original analysis of these policy issues while avoiding the cant and rhetoric that is often brought to bear. This is not the usual story of neoliberal ideology or the machinations of developers and other institutions of the white establishment. It is, rather, a powerful narrative of the everyday struggles to reach accommodation among legitimate contending interests within a dynamic black community.

In the last chapter, Pattillo draws the strands of her narrative into two threads. First, she observes, “[a]s a result of moving into schools, institutions, and occupations from which they were once barred, blacks have forged legitimate alliances with powerful white elites” (p. 300). One consequence of this success is that black professionals have the capacity either to marginalize or to broker. The tendency to do the former is tempered, she asserts, by the second thread in Black on the Block: that blacks of all classes share worldviews that are shaped by their common historical experience. The overall lesson is that, in defining the black community and its interests, “the middle is the place where the actual face-to-face work of inequality transpires” (p. 307). The black community is a dynamic process, always in flux, and—crucially—it is defined by its participants more than by outsiders.

The provocative and original thesis of this book will likely elevate it to the rarified level achieved by William Julius Wilson's (1990) The Truly Disadvantaged. Almost certainly, it will be considered a definitive analysis—perhaps even the most definitive recent statement—on the intersection of race and class in contemporary American society.