White Space, Black Hood Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality

by Cashin, Sheryll

• ISBN13: 9780807000298
• ISBN10: 0807000299
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-09-14
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.


Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks.

Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

Author Biography

Sheryll Cashin writes about race relations and inequality in America. Her books include Loving, Place Not Race, and The Failures of Integration. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Root, and other media. Cashin is Professor of Law at Georgetown University where she teaches Constitutional Law, and Race and American Law. Cashin worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She currently resides in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Stories They Told Themselves and a Nation

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
Baltimore: A Study in American Caste

CHAPTER 2
White Supremacy Begat “the Ghetto”

CHAPTER 3
Segregation Now: The Past Is Not Past

CHAPTER 4
Ghetto Myths and the Lies They Told a Nation

CHAPTER 5
Opportunity Hoarding: Overinvest and Exclude, Disinvest and Contain

CHAPTER 6
More Opportunity Hoarding: Separate and Unequal Schools

CHAPTER 7
Neighborhood Effects: What the Hood and America Demand of Descendants

CHAPTER 8
Surveillance: Black Lives Matter

CHAPTER 9
Abolition and Repair

Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
Index
About the Author