Sheryll Cashin

White Space, Black Hood Sheryll Cashin

The "ghetto," and all of our ideas about it, performs a political function that reinforces inequality and, as Sheryll Cashin argues, is the key holdover of the supremacist regime that has yet to be dismantled. Drawing on nearly two decades of research on cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces AmericaÂ’s investment in the ghetto before unpacking its legacy on today's society, illustrating how a combination of white opportunity hoarding and divestment from Black neighborhoods has resulted in an anti-Black caste. While Jim Crow laws subordinated Blacks in the South, northern cities embarked on an intentional process of ghettoization, defining black space through redlining and other policies and attributing the declining conditions caused by containment to the allegedly innate character of the people living there. Cashin calls for a third reconstruction to abolish the state-sanctioned processes of American caste and offers a vision of emancipation premised on the voices and movements of the denizens they've wronged. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity and inclusion in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, peacemaker fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for descendants, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood makes clear our glaring deficiencies in undoing 20th century damage in the 21st century.