♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪♪ , ♪♪ ♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪♪ good evening virtual audience you forome and thank joining us tonight braided on behalf of harbor bookstore, very pleased to introduce this event with sheryll cashin and her new book "white space, black hood" and opportunity and segregation in the 80s and inequality enjoying the conversation at his megan. and thank you for joining us tonight, the original event like tonight harbor bookstore continues bring others in the

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do our best to resolve them and thank you in advance for understanding as a noun pleased to introduce my speakers, sheryll cashin a carmack professor of law civil rights social justice and georgetown u university contributing editor for political magazine. she previously been a law professor from u.s. supreme court marshall as well as an advisor on community development in also the white house were numerous - and she's the author of the new york times book review editor. in the naacp nomination and legacy award nominated and loving. tonight professor sheryll cashin will be joining, the dean of professor a of law constitutionl law at harvard law in history

and harvard arsons sciences predict and the author of the book courage it to defend pretty long history of the civil rights movement braided we will be discussing the professor sheryll cashin latest book, "white space, black hood" interview is a resident and an important argument that white supremacy predict ...

be a sure my mother and i was flattered that you think for a lot of my former professors were faculty so it forced me to think like what would bee worthy of te occasion and they spend my entire academic career thinking about that and was very inspired by the book the new jim crow in the way he connected mask incarcerationar to antiblack institution jim crow but i wanted to see the connection

from jim crow to the iconic segregation black ghettos, black hoods and because it just seemed like each time we put to bed one there is another so it still manifests and the ideology round of changes. i had to find something to say to my alma mater but the other thing is i've >> my entire life, and i guess it's from my family at family in alabama about how dare other in society and how they are treated not just by whites but sort of like you know well you get the

point. i feel very passionate and i call the book in recognition of the connection to the two descendents of slavery and as i said in the introduction i wrote this book to humanize them an advocate for them. >> sheryll i have to say your lecture was impressive years ago and the book is really impressive. package.total you provide historical and legal analysis. you describe all of the relevant scholarship and we work in some of the same areas so i know that scholarship and beyond that you combinet storytelling and he do

it in 200 pages. it's really an impressive book and i truly congratulate you on the achievement.o >> thank you so much. that means the world to me. >> for those who haven't had a chance to read the book yet why don't t you go through and gives a brief overview of the arguments that you have. >> okay.t racial inequality that you see in american society is best explained by understanding that we have a system of residential cast that produces it. we intentionally did a fluent white space and the iconic black hood and high opportunity,

poverty free bastions could exist if we didn't concentrate poverty elsewhere and these two extremes are the most persistent kinds of neighborhoods that we have. in factt, the boundaries of a fluent white space and poverty are hardening. both are persisting in not going away. there's a lot in between but what i argue is that everyone in american society who cannot buy their way into a fluent white space is and they are emerging with as well. there's an opportunity. people trappeded in the hood get the worst of it and i'm saying it's the chief explanation for structural racism that we have

and residential cast in america is animated by three primary antiblack processes, boundary making which is a polite word for segregation opportunity hoarding, over a investing in a fluent white space is in stereotype driven surveillance. bridget toryf policing and private policing. that's the argument inen the bok and i call for abolition. >> thank you. i want to get in that discussion about abolition but i want to ask you about some of your work.

you talk aboutut marginalization and i wonder what is tory power of a cast. >> they are is a very popular book by the same title and i'm not talking about just social castes but the word is powerful. it evokes more than just racism. people who are in high-poverty neighborhoods, very few people are able to get out. that's the caste system. the caste also evokes the degree of other that's attached to folks in the hood. the stereotypes and really stereotypes, thugs, welfare

queen, ghetto, right? some of the stereotypes of laxer integrated in the hood. it's based on a lot of ideas often generated by people who have no knowledge of of people. i think caste is more powerful and for me caste to evokes entrenched structures and residential caste it are nothing if not structural. they become much more efficient when you overlay it with geography. those people over there aren't

worthy of coming to live in myspace. people come up with reasons to justify the way things are and i have a chapter as you know about mythology. i call a ghetto mythology but animating residential caste is high opportunity livingit is earned and people trapped in low poverty areas, that's the result of individual bad behavior and that he raises and masks a century of public policies that systemically. , actually render some neighborhoods devoid of any real opportunity. >> i think it's an appropriate word and as you say it's

powerful and it gets to the permanence of the situation. being totally devoid and being trapped is a very powerful word choice. you also mention at the top use the word descendent can you tell stories about descendents. can you say a bit about why that was the choice for this book? >> for me it's a term of eviction, of love of honoring an african-american legacy. words used to describe particularly poor black americans often have a negative connotation. like ghetto or whatever so i just found it to be -- it also evokes the truth that

african-american emancipated after the civil war were overwhelmingly in the south. their descendents became great migrants. they are descendents went north and south to escape jim crow and the primary response to black people in margin -- large numbers wherever they went was to detain them in hypersegregated neighborhoods and disinvest in those neighborhoods making them much worse than other places and i guarantee you that the folks who live in the hood, i guarantee you that overwhelmingly those folks are descendents of slaves.

it's a direct continuum which i just described. >> that's really important to talk about. not a lot of people do make those connections and again i think it's a very appropriate term. i want to finish the second half of your question. and thank you for noticing that. every chapter opens with a character or two and i tried to get their picture. i wanted to humanize my people, people as three-dimensional humanen beings and many of the people i feature are peoplee who overcame something that inspired me. so i have progress of women i tell their stories. and they do it chronologically.

i make the connection. i go from 1890 straight through and i do it really fast as you know and they get to the contemporary part quite quickly. like i said i really wrote this poor black people. i'm very influenced by her and she writes about how, first of all her whole career is about the black american experience and she wrote it for others. he wasn't trying to appeal to any w other audience. here's the truth of what are people of them through and she says in the book that i just pulled out in one essay you know

racial tension may never go away and it may never change. we can tell the truth and that's what i set out to do is to make it clear to myself and my people all these forces that are set against us and they never seem to stop. the more i learn the angrier i got but i just wanted to tell the truth about that and you know i wanted to. a bit of the bible. if you want to f understand whyt is you are here. >> yes.s. can you tell us one of those stories? pick a chapter. seemed okay. so many come to me but i'm going to pick a descendent in the

technical sense and a high poverty black neighborhood in washington d.c. and i interview her several times. she was in the very poor southeast d.c. near the maryland line. and i got to know her because she was a client of the georgetown health law clinic and to meet this woman, she was a dynamo. she is really an impressive person. she has a lot of knowledge and a lot of gumption and she actually had been middle-class through some unfortunate circumstances and found herself andnd her famy homeless and i follow her through the struggles to get

some stable housing and she was actually more functional than a lot of people around her and this homeless shelter and took of all the services that the georgetown law center provided her. i tried to show how much assistance she needed and it took a lawsuit because she was discriminated against. she got a housing voucher and it's not legal to discriminate a stunned source of income. she had a rare hard to get hugged opportunity voucher but for georgetown law students helping her through that settlement and putting pressure onon the housing authority in te east which finally, you only get months or something to get

your placement. they finally got some emergency assistance where they drove her toro certain spots but she stard out in a high opportunity place in the took her back out. it just shows the struggle in trying to get her kids into a decent school. she was 10 minutes away from -- but this is a person who has written books who has. >> this movement of women who endured all kinds of things where they have a monologue. she's just a striver. i could go on. that's one example. same with the storytellingll is

powerful and it's clear to me and to the audience that you have a lot of passion as well as expertise in that comes through so muchh in this work. >> did you have a favorite character? i'm just curious. didur anyone jump out at you? >> well i was attracted to the context. something that i try to do as well although i want to go back to something in particular that you just said. you mentioned that you want this book to be like a bible and he said he wrote it for the african-american community. and one of the things you talk about implicitly but also directly in the book is the

separation between the descendent and they have black middle class and the black americans so let's talk about that. let's talk about the contrast between the black middle class and those who are trapped in the ghetto. it's including affluent people including majority black cities. tell t us about how you would recommend trying to resolve some of those dilemmas. >> first i want to make it clear to the audience that the end to the african-american experience that i would welcome anyone to read it. i definitely had african-americans and their experiences in mind.

you hit the nail on the head. one of the point i'm making is pre- civil rights we have a caste system that was just based on race and in the south particularly no matter your economic status you were not caste too. theem good thing is people who prosper were able to exit back in the day when it was created the black people live together and most people who could accept high poverty moeed yusuf would have -- in fact the economic segregation is growing faster among african-americans. black and latino and it does

present a dilemma. james forman speaks to this. democrats outnumber republicans like 12-1 in the city to this city that i live in washington d.c. and it was overwhelmingly run by black people. they pursued mask incarceration to and i have heard words uttered about low income black people that are the same kind of stereotypes that non-blackes people participated in. and you know in a society that concentrates advantage and concentrates disadvantage of all people particularly have you know those people feel

pressure -- pressure to get as close to the high opportunity as they can. i'd saw this in washington d.c. edso the dilemma is distancing yourself from concentrated poverty and by the way concentrated property is growing fast in the suburbs and fast in the white areas to but it becomes necessary to thrive so descendents are worse off than they were before the civil rights revolution because they lost the proximity to our most successful black people and they lost the social influence. they lost their -- and there's a lot of social distance now.

so it is a dilemma and i put my kids inli public charter schools for the first seven years and each year of their education from first grade on each year the poverty rate grew higher in the last year they were in school 56% of the kids run free and reduced lunch. it began not to work so much. that's the dilemma. >> it is and the dilemma that i'm familiar with myself and as you said this book will help a whole lot of people understand the plight of people who are descendents and not fall prey to

mythology that affects everyone in this country. >> let me ask you about whites and people of color allies and how they are implicated and the story based tell about concentrated poverty and these unique circumstances, unique to african-americans.s. >> well it's only working for a very small fraction in the metropolitan area. only 7% of the population can buy their way into the highest opportunity places. thosegh places exclude, they hae exclusionary zoning and they often won't have a partner at

duplex or a quad plaques so they exclude non-rich people and what a lot of people don't realize is you are subsidized by everybody who'sid excluded. they often get more than their fair share of revenues raised and income taxes in terms of what the state decides to invest in for physical development. and so this whole system is destroying opportunity from most everyone whether you live in the city or in non-rich suburb or burrow area, america is no longer the land of opportunity for you.

and we have politics, taxes, taxes and biden is trying to change that but w we have polits that have historically maligned the people trapped but that's masking this system that structures opportunity and are severe segregation facilitates partisan gerrymandering. and i would say even the person who lives on high ground, i live in a neighborhood where i have hidden it gets affluent. it's not the most affluent in washington d.c. but it's a neighborhood of progressive and kind people who have the a lot

of black lives matter signs and we believe in science and things like that. i don't think my neighbors would call the police on my black friends and an unexplained situation. i'd like to believe that so many people and we saw this with the social protest after george floyd's of execution. so many people are hungry for something better than toxic division, fear and a society based on fear and separation.n. if we follow my suggestion for abolition and repair we would stabilize a lot of those neighborhoods and there would be a lot nicer neighborhoods that are less scary to people andan

we'd have more opportunity to return to the public institution a lot of high income people, i mean the hyperaffluent are always going to be in their own university but professionals feel the need to buy the most expensive house that they can afford or are a lot for private school. basically get the opportunity that's stable and good. in a society that wasn't based on residential task that had an attitude of care rather than predation and let's not fear in others i think the opportunity would be more widely distributed for everyone. >> that's a great, great answer

and insight that will be very persuasive to your readers. i'm going to turn to audience questions so i'd ask your audience to please post your question so i can ask sheryll about what's on her mind but i want to turn to the question to -- there's a chap or entitled abolition and repair and i wonder if you could share what is your vision of what needs to be done to dismantle and replace residential casts? >> i want to start out by saying my starting point was reading angela davis. i'm not the first person to talk about abolition and creating -- creating an abolition democracy so my vision came from them.

when you use the word abolition you were talking about transformation. i'm not talking about modest reform. the beauty of understanding is once you understand it the way forward becomes obvious. you just reverse those. the first thing i say is we need to change their relationshipla with the state from punitive to caring and paint the lands in which we see them. dare i say with love. but once you see descendent says three-dimensional human beings who are capable of agency and a potential asset it frees you up toes focus on and identify

policies that actually might be cheaper than what we are doing like mask incarceration over policing and more effect if. first you got to change the lens but then you reverse the processes. inclusion rather than exclusionism and mandatory zoning and mandatory affordable housing for all neighborhoods. green lighting rather than red lighting investing in historically defunded black neighborhoods that very neighborhoods that were red-lined in the 30s and cut off from traditional mortgages and investment to this day are just invested and depressed. they should be first in line for

these infrastructure dollars. they should be first in line for committee development dollars. there are studies in chicago and chicago spends three times moreo money and black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. having of equity analysis and paying attention to where the money goes in prioritizing and disrupting the unfair allocation and then third and this is what's been and is so much and i don't claim to have all the answers but we must keep policing -- and i offered the example of innovative programs that reduce gun violence dramatically just by focusing on the young people who are right relatively small number of

people, and young to me who like to pull a trigger or have been engaging gun violence but haven't been -- and giving them a mentor and a lifeline. it's a lot cheaper than incarceration. i give some helpful examples in the book of places that are doing transformative banks. there are things we can do. >> we have a number of questions,ti good questions and let me ask one. what do you see as city states and entities with power to begin developing the caste system in

the u.s.? >> i really do think the first it sounds very self-serving but you have to really understand what is going on and how systemic it is and i'd been to file the systems in black neighborhoods but i really do believe the first step is intentionally changing your lens and thinking that people as human beings and potential assets rather than deficits. that is the first but also a neighborhood analysis at the local level. you should put into your budgeting process and in seattle, the twin cities and all the more are doing this now for

you regularly annually assess and look at where dollars have been >> andt intentionally tried to deracialized equity but i was so inspired with joe biden who signed an executive order calling for a racial equity exercise and put susan rice in charge of formidable woman and basically said we are going to start paying attention to how the federal government spends so much money. trying to disrupt the process if we do nothing would tend to happen is people who are the

squeaky wheel gets more than their fair share so being overt about that and there are so many dimensions but angela davis talked about abolition is as much about building up as it is about terry down and we need to repair democracycy itself. we should grow a multiracial coalition that claims black lives matter and sustain the coalition. you have people who will show up at zoning meetings for affordable housing everywhere or her will fight for integratedls schools. it's a multipronged thing. >> so your discussion reminds me of such a beloved community and

people in the civil rights movement that would discuss and is quite resident way you say about starting with love. so sheryll there are questions about examples of locations and cities that have made real progress. you mentioned california. can you give us some other examples of the kinds of steps that arere important? >> louisville which i feature quite a bit in the chapter on schools was a very segregated in its neighborhood and segregated into schools. 90%ud of students who went to

school were black and 90% white over a 20 year period the louisville metro area became much more integrated in a constituency of people who volunteered. you have majoritarian politics in which the majority of people wanted integration after they got out of their court order. they continued their integration in a consolidated government and residents of segregation went down a lot in that area. it went from being a hypersegregated metro area to just being. moderately segregatd that is success and now they have done ane of education aroud

what happened in the third the 30s and wide black neighborhoods are the way they are but lately the city associated with it they have miles to go but they went from being hypersegregated to less segregated and tape than a pretty good job with creating and maintaining integrated schools much better than a lot of other places. asc lot of places in the south white areas are trying to secede from the school district. >> sheryll i want to go back to the conversation we were having about essentially affluent

blacks being a part of it -- and just asking about how individuals can rectify the disconnect of identifying as a member of the elites while trying to strive for abolition of the institution and structural barriers that allow some people to thrive both black and white so there's a dissonance. >> they are is. i live in one of two safely integrated neighborhoods in the district like a 50 year tradition of black professionals where whites were infused. i was in one and now i'm in crestwood.

i chose integration. this neighborhood i'm in is not economically -- but here's my point. there's more appetite for integrated spaces safely integrated spaces than there are neighborhoods to fill fill that appetite. because of our policies so i say while you are living your life you can use your time and treasure you can vote for and support policies that will make life better even if you yourself are not in close parks in the two people who are really struggling.

>> they are is a question about your writing process asking about what it was like working with -- and the most important are the question is what did you leave out and can you talk about that? >> writing is a joy for me and i don't struggle. i've never had writers block and i enjoy the craft of writing. i go to bed every night reading and writing and i love literature. for me this is my fifth book in my process is one i have but idiq to book deal with the deadline. i can't write unless i have it deadline and if i've got a deadline i'm very focused and my

friend is word count. and i write when i've got the research done and i'm ready to write it i map it out and i said that goal. when i was young and i'm not young anymore, but when i was younger i could bang out a thousand words today but i can do that anymore but as i was writing this i would write five and worked a day in some days if i wasn't feeling it once you start a start but it just getting up and doing it. the documentary about my heroin, she said she would get up at 5:00 a.m.. i would get up at 6:00 a.m. when the house is quiet and try to get my words done.

if you just say you're going to do a certain number of words in 10 days you've got 5000 words. and in a month you have 50,000 words. most books these days are 80 to 100 a lot of them don't want you to get too long. what was left out in this book? i spend a lot of time thinking about it. i really did. there were things cut in others. >> as i said at the top it's very well-structured. i'm not surprised to hear you say you did it in a very powerful way.

someone wants to know how the bronx is doing in terms of these issues? >> i can't speak to that. i haven't been there and i don't have any specifics to offer. back in the day and there has been an extraordinary amount of redevelopment since reagan, he was in the south bronx and i wish i could speak to it that i don't have any first-hand knowledge. i will say to the previous question i have a degree -- and i also have a law degree. you are talking about how

powerful it is but the engineer in me each chapter builds on the other adults onea the other and builds on the other and melts the passionate history with the science of it. >> they are is a question about whether your book is in dialogue with how tanks in the real estate industry and of mine black homeownership. >> i cited in the chapter on opportunity and i commend that book to you. it's shocking whatever black wealth we have has been taken, stolen from black people. through predatory lending and through installment contracts

which have resurfaced. people were.ra on in the 60s were it's like you're buying a house on my way and youan don't get any equity until the very last minute. private equity firms after the foreclosure crisis in 2008, 2010 have preyed on the very neighborhoods that suffered the most from the foreclosure. they were. on with predatory prime loans. they are going in there and snapping up foreclosed houses. they might pay 5004 at and turn it around and then sell it for 30,000 with anen installment contract which is designed to fail. they want the installment buyer to miss one payment.

they want them to fail and what did they do? they turn it over and give it to another person. they are transferring hard-earned dollars some essential workers to tight-end. and i learned this stuff and you see how animated i am? it just makes me angry. even when they are trying to win >> let me go backo to the bronx and you note thator the bronx is majority latino and the question is what the key differences are between the black and the latino experience. >> absolutely. there's a key difference. black people and i told her the story about the great migrant.

before the 1990s i'd say, let's say 1980s, black people were the only population singled out for hypersegregation. latinos wereti moderately segregated. this is douglas matthews book american apartheid. at one point in the 20th century there are 50 hybrid segregated cities in this country and all of them were worth a great migration ended up in large numbers so segregation has been a defining feature of the african-american experience in it continues to have consequences to this day. in the case of reparations for

an african-american making $100,000 who tend to live in a neighborhood with the accoutrements with what whites get $40,000 to get but as the latinx hispanic populations grew some areas in new york and l.a. where some have become hypersegregated but it's not the defining feature. the defining feature of oppression for latino people i would say is anti-immigrant rhetoric and donald trump of the things he has said about mexicans. and i say this both in the

entrance of this book and i want to make it clear i'm not saying that others have not experienced operations and i'm not saying that they don't experience it now. i'm writing about residential cas and residential cas are constructed based on antiblack animus that continues. >> you are saying other groups suffering continue to suffer. so it's time for the last question sheryll and it is a question about asking if you have any hope and things seem so bad sometimes it seems like there's no way. >> hope it's a choice. we are in a tough tough time and

in a pandemic and there's a reason why there is disproportionate death in black neighborhoods, lower opportunities in. existing conditions. we had talked about this in the health disparities. optimism is a choice. my feeling is the forces of darkness in this country and there are a lot of forces of darkness want you to be so depressed that you will get up and try to fight for anythingg different. and there are localities -- we have to have hope and we have to keep trying because if we give w

up and don't try is going going to get more of the same. >> i think you're chapter where you talk about abolition is very hopeful and thank you again for writing the book and i'm going to send it back over to hilary at the bookstore. >> thank you so much for doing this. >> thank you both actually. this is really wonderful and thank you to the audience out there for spending the evening with us. you can purchase "white face, black hood" on harper.com and have a good night keep reading and everybody please be well. thank you guys so much.

>> the initial title for the book was how to save your life today. i intended to write this book not about my own journey at all actually. i wanted to tell the story of all tomorrow. i wanted to show the world what i know about the incredible innovation and the dedicated people working here in our city and the difference where making and i wanted to tell them about the projects that i was so proud of overseeing a baltimore.

our opiate overdose work that saved over 3000 lives in three years and during that time i was here we entered -- that's what i intended to write the book on but in talking to my publisher over time i started to realize my story is also a story of public health and that story was hard to write the cause i think like many people i had left out some the difficult parts of my childhood and there were things i didn't really want to tell people and i had hid it away. i think people may have known parts of my depression but maybe not everything. my parents and grandparents suffered a loss during the

cultural revolution in china. they were dissidents who fought against the communist government. might grandfather my father went to prison and my grandfather was hauled out and beaten. my father had a lot of political troubles including what he was growing up and i went through long periods of time without seeing him. i say all this because i knew from an early age the plan, the goal was to leave china. i didn't know what is going to happen but this was our goal and the only way you could leave china at the time was for people to come to pursue a graduate education. my mother was very happy. she got into a graduate program here in the u.s.. actually she got into to graduate programs. one of them was in chicago at the university of illinois and

the other one was in logan utah at utah state university. she asked her professor where do you recommend that i go on the professor said oak a utah. that's where it's at. so was utah that we ended up in. there are so many crossroads and it's fun to think where would we be but that initial experience when we first came to the u.s. my family and i had $40. we didn't have money to buy a blanket and we didn't have money for heating. in the summer and utah was very cold and we did go through a number of challenges. my father delivered newspapers and he washed dishes at a restaurant. he was in engineer in china but

couldn't find work in this degree work because he didn't speak english. my mother did speak english and ended up teaching second grade in los angeles. she got her teaching degree and she also worked in a video store and clean hotel rooms. we went through many periods where we were every single day worried about money and are status but a member the argument that my parents would have and the angst that we would go through warning worrying about are we going to make rent. we were actually convicted several times and we ended up experiencing homelessness. those are things that beverly informed who i am and my understanding of public health. they are stories that i had not previously shared.

>> hi. i'm the executive director and i'm one of the founders of the center for liberty. it's part of the research that focuses on identifying and establishing market structure that will ensure the full independence as robust as american journalism in the digital age. i'm truly thrilled today to be able to introduce nikki usher a