White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  The pandemic shred government budgets, and pain abounds. I argue that a tourniquet should be applied where the bleeding gushes, where policy innovation will be most effective in starting a virtuous cycle for local and national healing, and where the moral argument for state intervention is strongest.

  THE CASE FOR ABOLITION AND REPAIR

  I begin by revisiting the key insights I have pssresented in this book. For centuries, America has been locked in a vicious cycle of creating and reifying anti-Black institutions that do harm to descendants and to the whole. One anti-Black caste system—chattel slavery—was replaced by another, and then another, down through the generations, to the modern-day institution of the hood and residential caste. Each anti-Black institution was constructed because of a pervasive ideology of white supremacy. Anti-Black mythologizing was the main tool for dividing and conquering, for creating solid white political majorities. Myths about descendants propelled laws and policies that conferred wealth on whites, plundered Black bodies and communities, and conscripted non-Blacks into othering and surveilling Black people. Our system of residential caste is ingenious in its ability to hide the truth of how and why we subordinate some and lift up others.

  The hood persists through classic processes of anti-Black caste: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. Today, government at all levels overinvests in affluent white space and disinvests in Blackness, with the exception of excessive spending on policing and incarceration. Segregation is at the heart of structural racism in America. In theory, the US Constitution and civil rights laws demand equal protection and treatment of Black Americans. In practice, American law and public policies have encouraged rather than discouraged segregation. Horizontal competition between communities of abundance and communities of need sets up a budgetary politics in which affluent spaces and people usually win. Politicians and non-descendants of all colors have participated in ghetto myths to justify containing descendants in high-poverty environs, or prisons, and to justify shrinking government, except the military and law enforcement. Fortunately, a revolutionary awakening has begun to disrupt this tired politics. A growing, multiracial coalition believes that Black Lives Matter. But the structures and policies that undermine Black lives, and divide the American house against itself, endure.

  Segregation and its mechanics of racialized favor and disfavor undermine opportunity for everyone. The American system of residential caste works only for the few who can buy their way into gold-standard neighborhoods that enjoy the best of everything. Everyone participates in this racialized system of opportunity for the few. The American way means trying to get into “good” neighborhoods and schools and avoid “bad” ones. Movers know, though they may not say it out loud, that what is really going on is avoidance of poor Black people in large numbers. Extreme segregation persists in metropolitan areas where large numbers of great migrants landed. The processes of residential caste and structural racism also operate, though perhaps less visibly, in less overtly segregated places.

  Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order. Intentional state action to create and maintain the racialized order included government-encouraged racially restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning, Negro-cleansing “urban renewal,” intentionally segregated public housing, an interstate highway program laid to create racial barriers, endemic redlining, and intentionally disinvesting in basic services for Black neighborhoods. Individuals making choices about where to live may not recognize or acknowledge how much the state, through investment and disinvestment, shapes racial patterns and perceptions.

  Residents of affluent white space hoard and receive more than their fair share of public and private treasure. They and the state also engage in boundary maintenance. Policing, surveillance, exclusionary zoning, and predatory nuisance laws protect affluent white interests and keep descendants at bay. Hoary stereotypes apply to descendants wherever they are. An insidious, unhealthy relationship persists between the state and descendants trapped in concentrated poverty. An unhealthy relationship also persists between people in the hood and those who fear and dehumanize them.

  People with no intimate knowledge of Blackness get their ideas about Black people through stereotypes about the hood. This divides regions and causes many to retreat or secede from shared public institutions. It undermines the social contract. The more racially divided a region is, the more inequality, the lower social mobility for poor children, and the weaker regional economy it tends to have. Given the outsize role of ghetto mythology in American politics, extreme segregation of advantage and disadvantage divides the nation and undermines our ability to pursue humane policies that promote the common good. Add to the harms of anti-Black residential caste the enduring forces of unregulated capitalism, technological disruption, COVID-19, and conspiracy-fueled domestic terrorism, and a nation once a beacon to the world could fall like ancient Rome.

  Healing a nation that began with, and still suffers from, white supremacy requires abolition of the processes of residential caste and repair in poor Black neighborhoods. To use the word “abolition” is to acknowledge that we should seek enduring transformation and not modest ephemeral reform. If the processes of caste described in this book are not abolished, we, like earlier generations of Americans, will be leaving to future generations the undone work of reconstruction and of reckoning with our nation’s original sin. Here I write of abolition of anti-Black processes on the continuum from slavery. The other original sin of Indigenous genocide and ecocide must also be reckoned with, with Indigenous nations and their assertions of sovereignty leading the way.21 Once again, in focusing on the anti-Black system of residential caste that ensnares us all, I am not denying that other groups suffer from oppression borne of white supremacy and other false ideologies. And I say to fellow agitators, authors, and advocates, write your books, tell your stories, and gather power so that we all might one day be emancipated.

  The first abolition was impoverished. Enslaved people were freed, but they were not free. Instead of receiving reparation for the taking of their labor and the damage of slavery’s violence, rape, denial of education and of personhood, the emancipated were forced into follow-on institutions of Black subordination. Most of all the emancipated were denied the agency of property ownership—the proverbial forty acres and the freedom to till their own land and be left alone by white people.22

  Abolition requires both the destruction of anti-Black institutions and the creation of new, humane structures of opportunity. In her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, the activist-philosopher-author Angela Davis advocated for the collective building up of a “constellation of alternatives” to carceral systems.23 The city of Richmond began that kind of reconstruction in creating the ONS and Peacemaker Fellowships. In her 2005 book Abolition Democracy, Davis expanded on the meaning of the phrase that W. E. B. Du Bois coined in his groundbreaking work Black Reconstruction in America. In Abolition Democracy, Davis wrote that abolition “is not only, or not even primarily, about abolition as a negative process of tearing down, but it is also about building up.” Davis emphasized what Du Bois had argued in Black Reconstruction, “that in order to fully abolish the oppressive conditions produced by slavery, new democratic institutions would have to be created.”24

  Similarly, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, geographer, scholar, and prison abolitionist, writes of “carceral geographies”—mainly the prison industrial complex, and its phalanx of extractive practices—and calls for “abolition geographies” to negate them. “Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place,” she writes. The hood, as I have described in this book, is an enclosure, a place with an operating logic of confinement, surveillance, disinvestment, and dislocation from opportunity—processes intentionally created through federal and local policy. Thus, while abolition requires dismantling these anti-Black processes, it also requires the creation
of new relationships to place and land, to resources, and to one another. As Gilmore writes, “making something into something else . . . is what negation is” and what abolition and repair, or reconstruction, requires. Her “abolition geography,” like Du Bois’s and Davis’s “abolition democracy,” is a way of “political organizing, and of being in the world [of] trying every little thing” to change and free ourselves of the old order and establish a new social order in the places where we live.25

  Applying this understanding to the subject of this book, abolition requires dismantling and reversing current anti-Black processes of residential caste—investment and “greenlining” of Black neighborhoods rather than disinvestment and economic predation; inclusion rather than boundary maintenance; equitable public funding rather than overinvestment and hoarding for high-opportunity places; humanization and care rather than surveillance and stereotyping. After a century of redlining, urban “Negro Removal,” intentionally concentrating poor Black Americans in segregated housing, disinvestment, foreclosures, and predation, without an insistent effort to stop this legacy of plunder, the modern descendants of slavery in iconic hoods cannot thrive. The state is obligated to repair what supremacy still breaks, that is, what the state put in motion and continues to reify. As we rebuild from the ravages of COVID-19, if we return to the norms of residential caste, the vicious cycle continues. With scarcity, there is a serious risk that the state will continue to overinvest in elites and prey on Black people for fees and revenue.

  My theory of repair is that those most traumatized by the processes of residential caste most deserve care and the chance to be change agents in their own liberation. That is what freedom means. I argue for prioritizing poor Black neighborhoods because they are at the center of American anti-Black residential caste. America exploits neighborhood difference and that is a key mechanism for redistributing wealth and resources to elites and for anti-Black plunder. A neighborhood analysis is critical both for understanding these processes and for disrupting them. The hood is where repair of the relationship with the state is most needed, both morally and as a matter of fiscal common sense. As with the transforming scenario of Richmond and its Peacemaker Fellows, focusing on the folk who are potentially the most powerful change agents directly confronts the stereotypes and fear on which residential caste is built. Only by focusing on that deep wound can healing begin.

  An example and some review of ground I have covered: It is immoral and does not make fiscal sense to spend more than $1 million per inner-city block to incarcerate residents for nonviolent drug offenses. In Chicago in the late 2000s, there were 121 such “million-dollar blocks” for nonviolent drug offenses; other large cities had similar patterns of expenditure that tracked concentrated Black poverty.26 Again, Black people do not use drugs at higher rates than whites. Such concentrated punitive spending is likely the result of aggressive policing in poor Black neighborhoods. This punitive investment paid dividends only to companies that profit from incarceration. It is not premised on seeing nonviolent drug offenders as potential assets who could contribute to society if they could overcome addiction. Punitive approaches merely take the drug user out of the community, causing harm to children who need parents and others who love and rely on that person. Punitive approaches harm the individual and all of the people on the block the user was torn from. It is a senseless waste of money that invests in a downward spiral.

  Government spends mightily in the hood for policies and practices that harm. With 851 “million-dollar blocks” in Chicago for incarceration from all kinds of crime, the state spent nearly a billion dollars on mass incarceration from very poor, historically segregated city blocks over a four-year period.27 The real issue is whether we value descendants enough to overcome the politics and vested interests of the status quo. The dominant political narrative determines policy choices. Anti-Black, tough-on-crime politics begat destructive policies that continue to damage. So yes, money should be redirected from incarceration and policing to investments in historically defunded hoods for strategies that show promise of healing.

  Researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania found that a program that gave Black teens in high-violence neighborhoods a summer job and an adult mentor reduced arrests for violent crime by 43 percent.28 A wealthy Texas couple who pride themselves on “transformative” results-oriented philanthropy paid for the $3.7 million airplane surveillance demonstration in Baltimore, which ended with questionable results.29 They and others might direct their treasure to a proven community organization that can offer jobs and mentors to the city’s most vulnerable teens.

  So the last should be first, and the first last, Jesus declared according to Matthew’s Gospel. Descendants in the hood are hurting. Like Richmond’s Peacemaker Fellows, they also have strengths. Like Lakia Barnett, the powerhouse I featured in chapter 7, descendants have expert knowledge about myriad obstacles that they must overcome. A novel idea is to ask them what they most need to prosper and listen carefully to the answers. Policymakers who live elsewhere might be surprised at the common-sense brilliance of their insights.

  If you are not willing to ask descendants what they need to be free, you are not really interested in their freedom and may be perhaps too invested in your own status and advantage. Seeing descendants as human assets and potential change agents is the first step to necessary emotional reconciliation. With revolutionary imagination and constant grassroots organizing, we can begin to create new institutions and practices based on first principles of stopping damaging investment in downward spirals and beginning upward cycles of reconciliation and repair. A new abolition democracy, driven by neighborhood analysis, would get at all of the intersecting systems that create racial inequality. Organizing also transforms the private struggles of individuals into a joyful movement to create new communities that work for and empower descendants, and all people.

  AN ETHIC OF LOVE

  In a powerful essay, author-activist bell hooks explored the potential and necessity of love in human rights work. She argues that without “an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination.”30 To use the word “love” in a movement for racial justice is to demand a radically new, empathetic seeing of folk who are persistently dehumanized. That is what is required and, as hooks argues, the individual who chooses to apply a lens of love to oneself and others immediately begins their liberation from cultures of domination. Applying love as the ethical foundation for politics, hooks argues, will best position us to transform. A lens of love introduces a critical eye that resists the ethic and language of domination and seeks truth about how systems of domination work. “Awareness,” she concludes, “is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom.”31

  I walk my integrated neighborhood of Crestwood and am encouraged by the posters telling me that Black Lives Matter. Some neighbors also display a familiar rainbow sign, proclaiming belief in love, science, and kindness. They hunger for something better and more humane than American caste. I take them at their chosen words. However, I say to all who profess that Black Lives Matter, be prepared to be uncomfortable and proactive in seeking transformation. It will require more of you than a sign. But in agitating for transformation, you will also gain.

  In her essay, hooks clarified the operational role of love in creating the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others have championed. By working in community with others to build something new, premised on ethical values of love and equal humanity, the advantaged person who chooses this work gets to experience joy in the struggle.32 Acting on the truth of our profound interdependence, or what legal scholar David Troutt stresses as mutuality, is other-regarding but also self-interested—a better way for humans to share a town, city, metropolis, or planet.33 Other-regarding agape love is the only sustainable basis for political communitie
s. A country premised on supremacy and a hierarchy in which descendants are at the bottom—what we have had in America for centuries—is exhausting and not sustainable because it is premised on and engenders violence.

  While we must prioritize poor Black neighborhoods, broader systems work is never finished in America. Among the undone tasks of reconstruction, we need to restore civil rights, particularly voting rights, and end gerrymandering. We can and should promote residential and school integration. We can and should transform our immigration system and fulfill our promise to undocumented Dreamers. Corporations and all public and private institutions should continue to work at being anti-racist. This, and so much systems work, is needed to repair what is broken in America.

  Regarding abolition and repair of residential caste, there are concrete steps the federal government could take to dismantle and repair structural racism. In a divided country, local governments have even more room to innovate on racial justice. Abolition of the old order has to start somewhere. Structural forces, isolation, and hoarding harm poor rural descendants, and they, too, deserve repair.34 Here I focus on cities because I believe they are our best hope for a brave new politics that could disrupt the habits of residential caste. Since the Black Lives Matter movement ignited in 2015, many cities have been forced to reckon with systems that surveil and plunder in Black neighborhoods. The people drawn to cities large and small, myriad in their colors and desires, are apt to be open to difference, offering a chance to build something new, a society that includes and works for everyone.