White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  OTHER BOOKS BY SHERYLL CASHIN

  Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

  Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America

  The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family

  The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream

  For descendants, with love

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Stories They Told Themselves and a Nation

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 Baltimore: A study in American Caste

  CHAPTER 2 White Supremacy Begat “the Ghetto”

  CHAPTER 3 Segregation Now: The Past Is Not Past

  CHAPTER 4 Ghetto Myths and the Lies They Told a Nation

  CHAPTER 5 Opportunity Hoarding: Overinvest and Exclude, Disinvest and Contain

  CHAPTER 6 More Opportunity Hoarding: Separate and Unequal Schools

  CHAPTER 7 Neighborhood Effects: What the Hood and America Demand of Descendants

  CHAPTER 8 Surveillance: Black Lives Matter

  CHAPTER 9 Abolition and Repair

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Image Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Images

  PROLOGUE

  STORIES THEY TOLD THEMSELVES AND A NATION

  Why not . . . incorporate the blacks into the state . . .? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained [and] the real distinctions which nature has made . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, 17881

  Two totally different races, as we have before seen, cannot easily harmonize together, and although we have no idea that any organized plan of insurrection or rebellion can ever secure for the black the superiority, even when free, yet his idleness will produce want and worthlessness, and his very worthlessness and degradation will stimulate him to deeds of rapine and vengeance; he will oftener engage in plots and massacres, and thereby draw down on his devoted head, the vengeance of the provoked whites.

  —THOMAS R. DEW, professor of history, metaphysics and political law, William & Mary College, 18322

  Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.

  —JOHN C. CALHOUN, US senator, 18373

  We hear much of the civilization and christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa. In my judgment, those ends will never be attained, but by first teaching them the lesson taught to Adam, that “in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread,” and teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves.

  —ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS, vice president of the Confederacy, 18614

  There are eight millions of white people and four millions of negroes in juxtaposition. The latter are, in domestic subordination and social adaptation, corresponding with their wants, their instincts, their faculties, the nature with which God has endowed them. They are different and subordinate creatures, and they are in a different and subordinate social position, harmonizing with their natural relations to the superior race, and therefore they are in their normal condition.

  —J. H. VAN EVRIE, doctor and author, 18615

  [T]he common white people of the country are at times very much enraged against the negro population. They think that this universal political and civil equality will finally bring about social equality . . . There are already instances . . . in which poor white girls are having negro children.

  —WHITE NORTH CAROLINA MAN, 18716

  [P]utting colored men into office, in positions of prominence, will gradually lead them to demand social equality, and to intermingle by marriage with the whites.

  —WHITE MISSISSIPPI POSTMASTER, 18717

  We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. . . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

  —HENRY BROWN, Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

  The white people of the country, as well as I, wish to see the colored people progress . . . Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.

  —WOODROW WILSON, 19148

  The sun is never allowed to set on any niggers in Glendive.

  —GLENDIVE (MONTANA) INDEPENDENT, 19159

  The general objectives of . . . planning are to conserve human resources and maintain the nation and the race . . .

  —ALFRED BETTMAN, director of the National Conference on City Planning, 193310

  I’m not prejudiced, but I’d burn this building down before I’d sell it to any damned nigger.

  —WHITE CHICAGO MAN, 194511

  Today in the urban slums, the limits of responsible action are all but invisible.

  —RICHARD NIXON, 196712

  We don’t mind being accused of police brutality. They haven’t seen anything yet. . . . [W]hen the looting starts, the shooting starts.

  —WALTER E. HEADLEY, police chief, Miami, Florida, 196713

  There’s a woman in Chicago. . . . She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

  —RONALD REAGAN, 197614

  Today I reject United States Sentencing Commission proposals that would equalize penalties for crack and powder cocaine distribution by dramatically reducing the penalties for crack. . . . Trafficking in crack, and the violence it fosters, has a devastating impact on communities across America, especially inner-city communities. Tough penalties for crack trafficking are required because of the effect on individuals and families, related gang activity, turf battles, and other violence.

  —WILLIAM J. CLINTON, 199515

  A new generation of street criminals is upon us—the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.

  —WILLIAM J. BENNETT, JOHN J. DIIULIO, AND JOHN P. WALTERS, 199616

  He was acting like a thug, not like a gentle giant. He certainly didn’t deserve to be shot for it.

  —BILL MAHER, 201417

  We need law and order. If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country. . . . Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, 201618

  These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd.
. . . Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP, 202019

  INTRODUCTION

  On Memorial Day 2020, New Yorkers headed outdoors, emerging after months of COVID-19 isolation. Two of them encountered each other in the Ramble, a woodland of Central Park that attracts hundreds of bird species and people devoted to watching them. Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper (no relation) were both graduates of elite universities; she from the University of Chicago, he from Harvard. They both used civil language as their encounter descended. Amy, wearing a standard white PPE mask, said: “Sir, I am asking you to stop recording me.” Christian said: “Please don’t come close to me.” More than forty million people watched the viral video of an ancient and dangerous American script.

  The video opened with the tension between characters already heated. Christian, a board member of the New York City Audubon Society, had asked Amy to leash her dog, which was the park rule and of particular concern in the Ramble to avid birders like him. When Amy declined to comply, Christian admitted later that he told her, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.” He attempted to lure the dog to him with a treat.1 Amy was incensed. Christian refused to stop recording her. She could have leashed her dog and walked away. Instead, she warned him that she would call the police. “I am going to tell them there is an African American man threatening my life,” she said, after Christian had asked her three times not to approach him.

  Amy Cooper was a finance professional, donated to Democrats, and used the phrase “African American man” twice, rather than “nigger” or “thug.” She followed through on her threat, called 911, and worked herself into hysteria as Christian continued to film her from a social distance. She preferred to struggle and yank her beloved cocker spaniel by the collar—making dog lovers wince—rather than surrender her power to weaponize her status. Her advance warning suggested she knew that police were primed to hear a fake distress call from a white female that tapped hoary stereotypes of Black men as predators.

  Multiply this interaction and other macroaggressions each day, all day, across the land, and you will begin to understand why being Black in America is exhausting. Amy operated as if the Ramble was her space in which she could choose who belonged and whether to comply with posted rules. A Black man, telling her what to do, was threatening and needed to be expelled. Later, Amy apologized, and Christian, though resolutely opposed to racism, expressed concern and reservations about the swift, mob-like destruction of Amy’s life as she became a social media example.2 Christian also refused to participate in a prosecutor’s investigation of a misdemeanor charge against Amy for filing a false report, and the charge was dropped after she completed a therapeutic program with instruction on racial bias.3 In a fantasy version of the story, the Ramble could have been a public commons for easier talk, even disagreement, among equals—a space not for white power but dialogue, more than once, maybe daily, as citizens tried to build a new, transformative American community. Not then, not yet.

  The same Memorial Day, in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, a white officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd was handcuffed, lying facedown, begging, “Please . . . I can’t breathe.” Bystanders beseeched the four officers, including Chauvin, to relent, to get off his back and neck. Chauvin was impassive, nonchalant, hands in his pockets, so determined, it seemed, to show citizens who was in power that he remained on Floyd’s neck after Floyd had stopped moving, with no pulse.

  Floyd had called out: “Mama, mama, mama, mama. . . . I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead.” He was polite to the end. His last words showed up on protest signs, including in Lafayette Square—a park in Washington, DC, named for a key French ally of the American Revolution, and once the grounds of a slave market. Citizens reinvigorated it as a space for free expression before a barricaded White House.4 Before death, Floyd spoke, though, like Christ crucified, asking God why he was forsaken, his pleas were not answered:

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Ah! I’ll probably just die this way.

  I can’t breathe my face.

  I can’t breathe. Please, [inaudible]

  I can’t breathe. Shit.

  I will, I can’t move.

  My knee. My neck.

  I’m through, I’m through. I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts.

  My neck hurts.

  Everything hurts. I need some water or something, please. Please?

  I can’t breathe, officer.

  You’re going to kill me, man.

  Come on, man. Oh, oh.

  I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. Ah! They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! Oh!

  Ah! Ah! Please. Please. Please.5

  Chauvin, who had eighteen previous misconduct complaints, could not muster any empathy or surrender his learned power to dehumanize. The nation and world convulsed in protests because seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the entirety of Floyd’s execution for all to see. It felt biblical, a sacrifice of a beloved Black son and father, to expose truth. Millions rose up across the globe. With a new lens for systemic racism, they began to see it everywhere.

  Floyd was killed after allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill he may not have even known about. “Forgery for what? For what?” he had said at the beginning of his encounter with the police.6 Christian Cooper was surveilled, perhaps, for being an uppity Black man. The twin viral episodes of Memorial Day 2020 converged, and a battle for narrative about Black Lives ensued over a summer thick with Black deaths—from COVID-19, police shootings, and yes, a seasonal rise in Black-on-Black homicides. It was #BlackLivesMatter versus “law and order.” An indecent president tried to distract the country from his failed response to COVID-19 and the nearly two hundred thousand people who had died from the virus on his watch by then. President Trump followed an old playbook of American politics, invoking myths that cast himself as defender of white Americans and their suburban way of life. He was honest and transparent in his pro-segregation leanings. White space was meant to be protected. The “infested” cities, particularly inner cities, rioters, and looters were meant to be policed.

  Trump’s desperate weaponization of racial justice uprisings, his defense of white space and white nationalism, mirror a tension that has been at the center of American politics since the nation’s founding. Each time the United States seems to dismantle a peculiar Black-subordinating institution, it constructs a new one and attendant myths to justify the racial order. Thomas Jefferson agonized in Notes on the State of Virginia about whether and how to incorporate sable Africans into the polity. Early generations of white property-owning men, those allowed to be leaders, told stories of Black inferiority to justify slavery. Later generations alleged sexual predation of white women by Black men to justify Jim Crow and residential segregation. Men and women of the so-called greatest and silent generations, as well as baby boomers from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, fabulized about the people in the hood. Always and forever, anti-Black rhetoric was critical to uniting whites in politics.

  This book aims to make processes of American residential caste transparent. A basic move, of creating and maintaining Black-subordinating institutions to confer value on affluent whites, has not changed, though the mechanics and propaganda have metastasized. I argue that policy decisions made in the early twentieth century, to construct ghettos, have profound consequences for producing current inequality. I also contend that geography is now central to American caste, a mechanism for overinvesting in affluent white space and disinvesting and plundering elsewhere. Geography helps to construct social and racial distinctions that justify the way things are.

  I call the Black people trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods “descendants,” in recognition of an unbroken continuum from slavery. Occasionally, I also use this honorific to describe Black Americans like myself,
who do not live in the hood but descend from the long legacy of slavery. Descendants are typecast and consigned to the bottom of the social order. Denizens of poverty-free, very-white spaces enjoy entrenched advantages, and everyone else struggles to access opportunity in real estate markets premised on exclusion begun a century before to contain descendants. The residential caste system I describe is not only about the iconic hood. It is about power, politics, and distribution of resources away from those who most need public goods to people and communities with more than enough.

  Non-descendants should care, because exclusion and opportunity hoarding harm the vast majority of people who cannot buy their way into bastions of affluence, and because geography as caste is destroying America. Physical segregation, constructed at the outset to contain then-Negroes, is the progenitor of our broken, gerrymandered politics. Descendants were powerless to change their reality in large part because of myths told about them. Mythologizing about “pathological” Black people helped perfect broad skepticism about government and anti-tax fanaticism.

  Of course, there are other strains of American oppression and dog-whistling rhetoric. Pervasive contemporary stereotypes of immigrants and Americans of color, of Muslims, and of Black Americans imply divergence from a presumed norm of American Christian whiteness. That norm, sometimes stated plainly by avowed white nationalists, was the organizing plank for regimes of oppression essential to American capitalism and expansion—from the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican people to slavery to the exclusion of Asian and other immigrants and, later, to Jim Crow. Ancient and current stories of oppression along myriad dimensions need to be told and retold to hasten the day when a critical mass of whites rejects the idea of white dominance and joins an ascending coalition to dismantle regimes borne of supremacy.7