White Space, Black Hood

Calls for the abolition of the 21st system of residential caste and a bold new investment to repair poor Black neighborhoods and our broken race relations.

Drawing on nearly two decades of research, Sheryll Cashin traces American society's investment in the ghetto before unpacking it's legacy on today's society, illustrating how a combination of white opportunity hoarding and divestment from Black neighborhoods has resulted in a vicious reincarnation of slavery. 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. The "ghetto," and all of our ideas about it perform a political function that reinforces segregation and, Cashin argues, is the key holdover of the supremacist regime that has yet to be dismantled.

Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood makes clear our glaring deficiencies in undoing 20th century damage in the 21st century, and offers a vision of emancipation premised on the voices and movements of the denizens they've wronged. Cashin calls for a third reconstruction to repair a broken nation and to enable denizens to take their rightful place as citizens.