White Space, Black Hood

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The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicans and people of all colors propagated "ghetto" myths to justify concentrating poverty in the hood and creating high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, law professor and historian Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste to demonstrate how the government-created "ghetto" is an active political construct that reinforces segregation and opportunity hoarding in the twenty-first century. Drawing on nearly two decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, she weaves together poignant narratives of descendants with unimpeachable research of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that affluent white spaces, rising inequality, and advantaged, low-poverty schools cannot exist without concentrated poverty elsewhere and stereotypes about people living in the hood. Geography has become that central to American caste. Cashin calls for abolition of state-sanctioned processes that systemically segregate, surveil, and undermine Black lives. The goal is to change the lends through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the estate 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 income, housing choice voucheres for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. White Space, Black Hood is an urgent call for understanding, dismantling, and then repairing the processes of residential caste in America. -- From dust jacket