White Space, Black Hood

July 12, 2021
Wealth, resources, and opportunity are overwhelmingly concentrated in white, affluent U.S. neighborhoods, which have a long history of excluding Black people through racial zoning, redlining, and violence, according to this astute history. Georgetown University law professor Cashin (Loving) explores how these exclusionary practices continue to affect residents of American cities today. The Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of West Baltimore, for instance, suffered after the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation gave it a “D” rating in the 1930s. Today, residents don’t have access to reliable public transportation, and recent plans to build a new light rail line were shelved by the state’s Republican governor, who funneled the money to road projects in “exurban and rural areas” instead. Cashin also details Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to heed the recommendations of the 1968 Kerner Commission report on the causes of racial uprisings in Black neighborhoods, and explains how Ronald Reagan used exaggerated claims about welfare fraud to slash the social safety net. Cashin’s levelheaded reform suggestions draw from real-world success stories, such as an outreach program in Richmond, Calif., where gun violence plummeted after “violence-prone” young men were given access to therapy, job training, and a monthly stipend. This is a well-researched and persuasive guide to a major source of inequity in the U.S.

July 15, 2021
A new urban studies text offers a thorough, well-researched history of inner-city blight as the inevitable legacy of segregation and racism. Georgetown law professor Cashin, the author of Loving, Place Not Race, and other notable books on racial issues, shows how so many of today's "descendants" of American slavery are trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods because of deliberate state and federal policy decisions that "construct ghettos" and perpetuate inequality. She illustrates how anti-Black processes of sorting out the "residential caste"--boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance--led to overinvestment in affluent areas ("white space") and disinvestment from Black neighborhoods. Using the urban history of Baltimore as an example, Cashin describes how "redlining" codified a two-tier system of home loans; "blockbusting" enticed panic selling by White homeowners; and intrusive road-building cleared out inner-city "blight" (read: "undesired people"). "Urban renewal" effectively contained descendants in high-poverty, high-crime areas. Ghettoization, in turn, defined Black space, allowing bigots to attribute bleak living conditions to Blacks' allegedly "innate character." Even the word ghetto became an adjective describing inner-city style, dress, speech, and social codes. All of these hold today: "The past is not past." Segregation, fear, and racism are mutually reinforcing. The implicit racism in the redlining process often led to D ratings for Black neighborhoods, marking them as "hazardous," while the Federal Housing Administration's 30-year mortgage plan, a path to the middle class, has always been offered primarily to Whites. Meanwhile, interstate highways facilitate White flight, effectively creating walls around Black neighborhoods. While extensively documented and amply footnoted, Cashin's survey remains compelling and accessible to a general readership. She clearly presents the effects of concentrated poverty on a populace--how, for example, segregated schools affect educational outcomes--and shows how the work is never done. "While we must stop the bleeding at its source and prioritize poor Black neighborhoods," she writes, "broader systems work is never finished in America." A resonant, important argument that White supremacy and racial division poison life in our cities.

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September 1, 2021

In this exploration of geography's role in sustaining the American caste system, Cashin (law, Georgetown Univ.; Loving; Place Not Race) tackles the origins of what she calls the "Black hood" or "ghetto," a lasting legacy of racism in the United States. Cashin uses two decades of urban studies research on cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and New York to prove that anti-Black state and federal policies and overinvestment in "white space" (i.e., affluent areas) have helped to forge the three main urbanist tools used to suppress Black neighborhoods--boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. In contrast with the spate of books that address racial segregation with only a dispassionate academic focus on statistics and data, Cashin fills her book with personal stories from the Black Americans who have effectively fought the residential caste system. This book covers territory that will be familiar to readers of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law, to which Cashin adds potential solutions rooted in respect and humanity. VERDICT Cashin's study of the racial foundations of residential castes is an accessible and compelling read that balances historical documents with personal narratives. Highly recommended.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

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