White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality-Fast Shipping

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A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

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

Theiconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar Americaninstitution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians andpeople of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racistpolicies that concentrated poverty in the hood and createdhigh-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood,Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residentialcaste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-drivensurveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work todismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Drawingon nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, , Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes ofresidential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, andtransportation. She contends that geography is now central to Americancaste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist ifthe state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physicalracial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of thesestate-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lensthrough which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods frompresumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship ofthe state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She callsfor investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Blackneighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhoodcenters, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basicincomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusivehousing elsewhere.

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

Includeshistorical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history ofresidential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racialoppression.