In Segregation Made Them Neighbors, William A. White III presents the little-known history and lived reality of African Americans who moved “west” (post–Civil War to post–World War II) to urban Boise, Idaho, where they were relegated to buying and renting homes among poor whites and immigrant families in the River Street Neighborhood. His project demonstrates the importance of place-based research when investigating questions of race, racialization, and segregation. Boise was a complicated place, where schools were never segregated, but housing and employment options were circumscribed. The neighborhood was bounded by railroad tracks, industrial warehouses, a power plant, and the oft-flooding Boise River. Although three-fourths of the River Street Neighborhood's residents were not African American, Boiseans designated it as the Black neighborhood due to the one-fourth who were. In telling their stories through oral interviews and archaeology, White shows the interconnectedness of Blacks, immigrants, and poor whites living in the River Street Neighborhood. He touches on the sequential immigrant experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Basque residents and demonstrates how the Basques transitioned from nonwhite to white over time. Beginning with the removal of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples from their homelands of more than 10,000 years, the author brings Indigenous voices full circle in his dialogue with Indigenous archaeologists who contributed methods for public involvement in the archaeological research process. He finishes with an appeal for an anti-racist archaeology that transforms the field through public power over narratives, research questions, and archaeological analyses. White concludes by arguing that this transformed archaeology should include publics other than archaeologists, scholars, and government administrators.

This book would be an effective text for upper-level archaeology classes. White investigates the intersection of race and class, introduces previous work at urban and plantation sites, and discusses in depth the rise of community-based participatory archaeological research and its implementation in anti-racist projects and field practices—all while emphasizing the call to arms to decolonize traditional archaeological practices.

White defines racism, prejudice, white supremacy, discrimination, anti-racism advocacy, whiteness, refuge area, disinvestment, structural racism, power, the capitalist system, homeplace, placemaking, habitus, collaboration (and what this looks like), and anti-racist archaeology. What is missing are definitions of Black, Blackness, and chocolate maps. White also missed an opportunity to state that there is no biological basis for the concept of race and that instead we are all one human species with population differences. He does explain that races are a social construction made real through racism and racialization. Also, in his discussion of African American soldiers moving to the area, White explains that military bases housed only the soldiers and not their families. I was left wondering if this was standard practice or a policy motivated by racial segregation that forced Black Boise military families to live off base.

Discussing the public archaeology project within the River Street Neighborhood, White offers issues to consider when crafting future urban research designs in Black settings, such as the disproportionate demolition and gentrification/renovation activities in “blighted” neighborhoods that affect preservation efforts and archaeological deposits. He emphasizes the importance of oral histories and the interpretation of data through a variety of partners to tell a more complete story of past lifeways. In his project, volunteers became activists because the project became a workshop on race, racism, and racialization for dozens of residents. Project leaders were teaching while project personnel experienced the tactile, archaeological acts of excavating, screening, and cleaning artifacts, thereby making the intangible past accessible.

White calls for archaeologists and the field in general to engage in self-reflection, stating, “Antiracism advocacy in archaeology is a position that requires recursive action that originates from a place of reflexivity and a desire to cause positive change in the world” (p. 9). Archaeologists can accomplish this “by disseminating their research in such a way that helps communities heal past wounds and address archaeology's racist past” (p. 10).

Each chapter of Segregation Made Them Neighbors is crafted as a starting point for further discussion of not only silent segregation techniques in Boise but also of shared tactics of resistance, survival, and camaraderie uncovered through oral history, documentation, and artifact interpretation. Throughout this book, White calls for implementing an advocacy archaeology derived in part from community-based participatory research, as exemplified by the River Street Neighborhood project.