In Black America; White Space, Black Hood, with Sheryll Cashin

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. I really use my engineering skills to think about why is it that we have communities of great abundance and great need and how is it that this was construction and why does it persist? And I really came at it with a kind of a scientist inquiry and that's how I came up with this theory. It's not a theory, it's true, but we have a system of residential cast in this country and that the extremes are affluent white space and high poverty, black hoods and we over invest in affluent white space and we disinvest in black neighborhoods, particularly Portland and we

have you know, processes of residential cast that I sign a light on. Sheryl Cassian, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University and author of white space, black hoods, opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality published by Beacon Press. In the book, Cassian explores the ways in which American policy decision constructed a residential cast system, resulting in the entrapment of four African-American people in high poverty neighborhoods while excessive resources are funneled to affluent districts in the same cities, drawing on nearly two decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York and Cleveland. Cassian traces the processes of this nation's cast system as it relates to practicing housing, policing, school and transportation. She underscores the urgency of resigning new

humane systems that stop investing in segregation and promote repair and equity in historically underfunded neighborhoods. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of in Black America. On this week's program, white space, black hood, opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality with law professor Sheryl Cassian in black America. Black people started to just walk off and leave the South to escape this violent oppressive system and the signature response to six million black people moving north and west was to contain them in their own neighborhood. In Chicago, they tried to contain black people into eight square miles. The density was shocking compared to what whites' neighborhoods were like. Starting in the 30s, the government, the federal government insisted that majority black neighborhoods not get to

participate in their new subsidized mortgage program. The federal government marked virtually every black neighborhood. According to national housing experts, in today's debate over single family zoning, it is well known that it's reinforced and has often been used to maintain racial segregation. What is less well known are the deeply racist origins of zoning itself in America. Law professor Sheryl Cassian has written extensively about racial relation and inequality in this country. In her new book, white space, black hood, she continues that geography is now central to American caste and detail new policy decisions made in the early 20th century to intentionally construct ghetto manifest in inequality and opportunity hoarding today. Connecting history with the president, poverty free havens and poverty dishoots would not exist if the state has not designed constructed and maintained this physical racial order. Caching

call for abolition of residential caste and for government to change this relationship with the hood for opportunity to carry investing in a new infrastructure of opportunity and cooling richly restored schools and neighborhood centers. Recently in black America spoke with professor Sheryl Cassian. I'm going to begin the interview with how are you navigating this pandemic? That's far. Pretty good. I'm vaccinated. My whole family is vaccinated. We still wear masks. We wear them when we go into public places. My kids wear masks in schools and we do not complain about it. We're happy about it. We're all healthy. Tell us what was life like growing up in Huntsville out of Alabama? Well, I had a very exciting childhood. I was the child of civil rights activist. This is another book. I'm not vlogging this book today, but the agitator's daughter. My father, John Cassian, founded the National Democratic Party of Alabama. I guess you might say the Alabama equivalent of the

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He has a medical background brother. Does your dad have a medical background? He was a dentist. He's deceased, but he was a dentist by profession, but an agitator by application and put much of his own money from a dental practice into this political party that returned black people for the first time since reconstruction back to representing black people in the black belt of Alabama and the state legislature. My father ran for governor against George Wallace. I had no illusion of winning, but that's what I come from. And this book, White Space Black Hood, is a love letter. It's written for the people I call descendants. Black people trapped in high poverty neighborhoods. I was taught by my parents to care about my people, and particularly my people who are very

marginalized. So thank you for asking about that. And your attendance Vanderbilt and your obtaining degree in electrical engineering. So how did you go from electrical engineering to law? Well, I hunts the Alabama as a place full of engineers. And I was influenced by that. I actually also loved math and science. NASA is there, right? NASA is there, right? It was a very common profession, actually quite a few black engineers. And to be honest, my parents were, they paid a lot for their education. And financially, by the time I was in high school, there was a lot of money if you wanted to go into engineering. I went to Vanderbilt on a full scholarship.

And, you know, but I never stopped having that education fever about halfway through the Vanderbilt program. I really realized, I don't want to be a professional engineer. And I started thinking about going to law school then. And, you know, when I finished, I did go to law school. And that the system's analysis I do in this book, it's the engineer in me that enabled me to figure this out. You know, I spent two decades thinking about this. And I so appreciate you reading the book. Some hosts don't actually read the book. You can tell, but I could tell you this from our initial conversations before coming on. You know, I really use my engineering skills to think about, why is it that we have communities of great abundance and great need? And how is it that this was construction? And why does it persist? And I really came at it with a kind of a scientist

inquiry, you know, and that's how I came up with this theory. It's not a theory. It's true that we have a system of residential cast in this country. And that the extremes are affluent white space and high poverty black hoods. And we over invest in affluent white space and we disinvest in black neighborhoods, particularly poor ones. And we have, you know, processes of residential cast that I shine a light on. Before we get into chapter one, you began the book by illustrating what took place in Central Park with the dog with the Cooper's and not not related to each other, of course. Right. Why so? Well, I wanted this book to be readable. I didn't want it to just be facts and figures every single chapter features a black American. Right. And their life and how they're affected. And, you know, it blew my mind that within hours of on a Memorial Day 2020,

you had that that situation where was it her name Amy Cooper calls the police in a hysteric whips herself up into hysteria claiming that she's been being attacked or, you know, by a black man. And with, you know, within hours of George Floyd's slow execution. And those are two powerful stories that illustrate one aspect of our caste system, which is surveillance, area type, back surveillance of black bodies, whether you're in, you know, Central Park or you're, you're, you know, out on the corner in, you know, a marginal neighborhood, right. And so I told, I chose to open there. And that was when I wrote this during the pandemic. That was what was really going on when I started the writing. I've been researching for a long time, but that,

that was back, you know, back in the summer of 2020, everybody was talking about it and thinking about it. And both stories and different ways broke my heart. I understand. I found it interesting. And prior to we having ghettos quote unquote, in the 1800s, almost all African Americans were able to live or the sentence that you described in the book were able to live freely among the masses and then like a light switch was switched on and everything changed. But you began your narrative in Baltimore. Why Baltimore? Well, Baltimore is an excellent case study of everything that's been thrown at black neighborhoods. Baltimore had one of the largest free black population in, you know, Maryland was a slave state. Fred Douglas was enslaved in Maryland, right. One of

the largest free black populations in the before the Civil War. In fact, the free blacks walking around in Baltimore was what stimulated Frederick Douglass to free him to seek his freedom, right. But in the late 1800s, 1890s, black people in Baltimore to go shop, try on the clothes, you know, put on the hats, go wherever they wanted to, live where they wanted to, walk into stores, segregation begins to get created, particularly in the north and west as a response to the great migrants. Over beginning in the teens, the 19 teens, black people started to just walk off and leave the south to escape this violence oppressive system. And the signature response to six million

black people moving north and west was to contain them in their own neighborhoods. In Chicago, they tried to contain black people into eight square miles. Right. You know, the density was shocking compared to what whites, what whites neighborhoods were like, right. And you know, starting in the 30s, the government, this is redlining, the government, the federal government insisted that majority black neighborhoods not get to participate in their new subsidized mortgage program. Right. So the federal government marked virtually every black neighborhood in the country, major, large black neighborhood in the country as hazardous. Right. And so they, they not only segregate the great migrants, they cut them off from traditional financing, you know. And then

these neighborhoods get preyed on with, you know, by speculators with installment contracts and what modern days the prime lending. Well, you know, you fast forward to today the very same neighborhoods that were redlined in the 30s are still largely suffering from disinvestment and both by, you know, private and public actors in the, and ball in Baltimore to, you know, the new mayor is trying to change it. But in that chapter, I take Baltimore through all of it, from the 30s to the, you know, containment, then to, you know, urban renewal, Negro removal, you know, that's what Baldwin called it. Right. To laying the interstate to mow through, right through some of the most vital black areas, you know, black areas, you know, in the west,

the east and west, they call it the butterfly, the black butterfly, east and west, Baltimore is where black people are concentrated. Those just to be vital neighborhoods. The neighborhood with Freddie Gray was killed. Used to be this, you know, it was called Baltimore's Harlem, you know, Cad Calaway and other people performed there. It was, these were vital neighborhoods, but, you know, that, but the cumulative trauma of urban renewal and then using the highways to just mow through these neighborhoods and create the, use the highway to create a wall between the white areas and the black areas and then putting all the public housing for black people in the same areas and creating concentrated poverty, you know, these, these, these neighborhoods have gone through cumulative trauma and harm at the hands of the state. And then, you know,

you add to that predatory policing, you know, the police look at everybody, everybody, particularly every young black man is presumed to be a bug rather than a citizen and often treated as such, you know, this is what I expose in this book. And so, Baltimore has it all from, you know, the first effort to use racial zoning was in Baltimore, you know, and they were, you know, W. the boys lived in Baltimore at that time. A lot of, you know, very intelligent. I feature these guys that no one's heard of, you know, they were lawyers, right? Very well educated lawyers, agitators, civil rights lawyers, you know, the design, the effort to create racial zoning to stop black people from living where they wanted to start it when one of these lawyers wanted to buy a nice house in one of the, on one of the nicest streets in the city, you know, and then white

people were like, no, what, what's he doing coming on our blocks, you know, and that's how it started. Baltimore was just a great example and then the, I'll admit, the, the, what, what brought me to Baltimore was this story of the Republican governor, the new, then newly-elected Republican governor, Larry Hogan, deciding to rescind a new, a new light rail line, ironically called the red line, that was going to connect East and West Baltimore to job centers, right? There was going to be going to help people who depend on public transportation, right? And was going to reunite the city through transit, like decades in the making, all ready to go and he rescinds it. And what does he do? He reallocated all of the money, you know, well, no, no, let me get that right. No, almost three quarters of a billion dollars. Sorry about that. He reallocated all to majority white outlying areas for roads. Doesn't even give some of Baltimore the money for its roads, right? And, and, and I was

outraged by that story, you know, that's what made me feature Baltimore because I thought it was a classic example of what I said, over investment, we over invest in affluent white areas and disinvest in blackness. And Baltimore showed that in space. Ms. Cashier, I also found it interesting that when African Americans were able to uplift themselves and move away from the inner city, when they did move or they were in concentrated areas themselves in the suburbs, but the neighborhood was also always adjacent to from where they came from. Not that far. That's the thing. The segregation is a defining experience for many black American. You know, there's this interesting statistic. Black people making a hundred thousand dollars a year, which we like to call good money, you know, that's some pretty good money, right? Black people

making a hundred thousand dollars a year can deliver neighborhoods with the same kinds of amenities as white people who make forty thousand dollars a year, right? What tends to happen is black middle class neighborhoods are often buffered to poorer black neighborhoods, right? So, you know, you may not live in the hood, but you may not live far from it either. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So, in your research and I had been mulling over this when I was rigging the book, what made the majority population so leery that they were fearful of living next to or close to descendants? Well, it started. So, I should say that black people had more freedom when they were smaller and numbers, right? Cleveland before the Great Migration was actually known for pretty

decent racelations. I featured that. And then, but when black start coming in large numbers, it creates panic. And then, realtors actually stoked and played on white people's fears. Okay. They would do all kinds of things to, you know, to make profit. They would not go indoors and say, Negroes are coming to the neighborhood. You better sell quickly, you know? I mean, there are even some games where they would pay and we were called Negroes back then, right? But they would pay a black person to like, you know, walk up and down the neighborhood to scare people. So, you know, it's part of our legacy that people do this for profit, they do it for vote, they do it for ratings, to stoke people's fears, you know, rather than try to build bridges, right? But once they, you know, segregate black neighborhoods and then disinvest in them, you know, of course, you know, you see black people limping in tenements piled up on top of each other and

you're not investing in their roads, their sewers, their trash collection, then people begin to associate the conditions of those neighborhoods with the black people who live there. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? And then, you know, then people are more nervous about living among black people, you know? And we've been dealing with that ever since. When you talk about the current commission, now we have 53 years out from the current commission and look like we've gone 360. What the current commission illustrated and documented in their report, we're living that in 2021 again. Right. I mean, what they found was that all of these uprisings in the 60s. I mean, thank goodness we don't have as many now as we had then, but, but, you know, it just seems like every couple of weeks, there's another shooting somewhere of some black person in questionable circumstances. And then that causes, all right. But back in the 60s,

I do remember this, you know, I've been quite vividly because I lived in Detroit, right? 67, 68, 67. There was something like 159 uprisings across the country. And we all know 68, particularly after King's assassination. And so the current commission, they found that almost in every place where there was an uprising, the spark that lit the fire was police abuse, right? You know, a abusive police person, you know, or some kind of dispute where people just got tired and didn't look at it anymore. And, you know, and so they would rise up and revolt. They also talked about, you know, all this disinvestment, what the, you know, I don't like using the word. I use it as a descriptor, not as a purgative, but what the black ghetto was like. You know, people had no idea how deprived the environment was. And so the current commission,

it was amazing how progressive their recommendations were. Right. Beyond reform and policing, they, they, they, and they came with it. The wording was unbelievable. They said the white America created the ghetto. They're complicit in it. And we, we shouldn't guild the ghetto. We need to dismantle it and, and create some fair housing and start creating one America rather than two. And, you know, there's a famous line, you know, that America's at risk of becoming two, two Americas, one black, one white, separate and unequal. Well, they kind of, it kind of has come true. And we're more toxically divided in our politics. But I'll tell you, I, I, the thing that makes me hopeful, um, in the wake of George Floyd's killing, what black people have a lot of allies. You know, more than they've ever had before. And, and you see with the Biden administration, with Biden's election, I've never seen in my lifetime a presidential

candidate who won, speak so forthrightly about the need for racial equity for closing the black white, uh, wealth gap for, you know, for racial justice. I'm, I, you know, I've never seen it, right? And, you know, he put to the rice and charge within hours of his inauguration. He signed executive orders saying, we're going to have a program of racial equity. You know, we're going to start paying attention to where the money goes. And so the man has a lot on his plate. But I'm hopeful, not just, not just at the federal, but I'm hopeful, even more so at what I see happening. And I feature some of these where, you know, people, people rose up after Floyd's killing and, and began to try to change the politics and change the policies. And I feature some of that. You also write in the book, Miss Casson, when America says that they want African-Americans

to be self-sufficient, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And then we have Tulsa and Greenwood. So what are they talking about? Once we achieve a level of success and, and sustainability amongst ourselves, and then the majority population want to come and, and burn it down. I don't understand that. Well, they did burn it down. I put, I put in the book Pictures of it. Yes, you did. You know, the pictures, the very, the, the, the first domestic terrorism, the first act of the domestic terrorism with a dropping a bomb on America was Tulsa. They dropped bombs on Greenwood from the sky. Yes, they did. Right. I didn't know that before I researched it. And then your foul pictures of it. You know, it was vicious. And the, the people of Greenwood were doing everything that the right lectures black people to do. Right. So, you know, there's a sense

in which you can't win. Now, thank God, we don't have programs like that anymore. You know, we, we, we, we, we have a punitive relationship, though, between the state and black neighborhood, with the state in, the state invests mightily in policing and incarceration. Right. We, they overinvest in that. The relationship is punitive. Right. The, the, unfortunately, far too few localities see black people and their neighborhoods as assets that could contribute if they had the investment. She'll cash in the Carmack Waterhouse, Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. And author of White Space Blackhood Opportunity Hording and segregation in the age of inequality. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions asked your future in black America programs, email us at in black

America at kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. You can get previous programs online at kut.org. Also, you can listen to a special collection of in black America program at American Archive of Public Broadcasting. That's American Archives.org. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessary, those of this station or other University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for Technical Producer David Alvarez, I'm Johnny Ohenson Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America CDs. KUT Radio 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78712. That's in black America CDs. KUT Radio 300 West Dean Keaton Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78712.

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