White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  I suggest three critical pillars to guide state action: (1) change the relationship of the state with descendants from punitive to caring, (2) see descendants as potential assets and empower them to be change agents, and (3) invest resources and transfer assets to support descendants and respected community institutions in the process of repair. Here is the crux: dismantling unjust budgetary habits and reducing systemic racism will require sacrifices from white communities that have disproportionately benefited from anti-Black policies for decades. After a revolutionary moment where 96 percent of Americans have acknowledged that Black Americans face discrimination, are we finally ready to readjust our spending priorities?35

  A critical point bears repeating. Applying a humane lens to descendants frees policymakers to innovate and focus on evidence-based strategies that might be cheaper and certainly more effective than punitive policies borne of racial dogma. At the local level, details of what to cut and where to reallocate should be forged by multiracial coalitions that are constantly gathering political power, led by indigenous Black voices with expert knowledge of what their neighborhoods need. In this way, the processes of abolition and repair will also repair democracy. Beyond repairing the state’s relationship with high-poverty Black neighborhoods and the people who live there, transformative strategies might begin to repair our broken race relations. As street violence is reduced and descendants humanized, nondescendants might avoid and surveil Black people less. Perhaps they would support investments in public institutions and participate in them more. Out of the ashes of the COVID pandemic and a five-decade cultural war about the hood, a reinvigorated public sphere and social contract might emerge.

  Among the new processes that might be instantiated would be a regular neighborhood analysis that looks critically at all of the money being spent by the state across neighborhoods and a constant evaluation of racial equity. There are pieces of this dream. Seattle, Minneapolis, and a few other cities formally require a racial equity analysis in budgeting.36 In 2018, Baltimore adopted a law requiring city agencies to assess existing and proposed policies “for disparate outcomes based on race, gender, or income” and to proactively develop policies and investments to prevent and redress those disparities. A first in the country, Baltimore also amended its city charter—by a ballot referendum that nearly 80 percent of voters approved—to establish a permanent Equity Assistance Fund to attack structural racism and advance racial equity in housing, education, and capital expenditures.37

  In Milwaukee, Black citizens were outraged to learn that nearly half of the city’s annual budget went to its police department. In the summer of 2019, the African American Roundtable and other community groups launched the Liberate MKE campaign, which surveyed 1,100 residents across the city about how to allocate their tax dollars. Citizens identified three priorities: violence prevention not tied to policing, affordable housing, and jobs for youth. They wanted participatory practices that empowered residents to influence city budgets. Other recommendations arising from the survey included increasing pay for city internships and representation from historically underrepresented neighborhoods in those internships and a universal basic income (UBI) program. Liberate MKE proposed eliminating sixty police officer positions by not filling retirement vacancies to free up savings and setting an overall goal of moving $25 million from policing to community safety and health programs.38 The COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s death added momentum to their demands. The campaign succeeded in procuring an initial reallocation of $900,000 from policing to priorities citizens had identified. The city council also authorized a UBI pilot.39

  Before our revolutionary season of 2020, I thought replacing the anti-Black lens with one of care and concern for descendants was improbable. Now, I perceive a hunger for healing. According to the New York Times, an estimated fifteen million to twenty-six million people protested peacefully for Black lives in some 2,500 localities—perhaps the largest movement in US history.40 New empathy can spur audacious thinking.

  Among the revolutionary possibilities for repair, initiate peacemaker fellowships in other violence-torn neighborhoods. And while America may not be ready to support a universal basic income for all who need it, ascendant coalitions that do control governments could try a UBI pilot in neighborhoods where the state intentionally created ghettos. Stockton, California, initiated an eighteen-month pilot UBI program in 2018 in which it transferred $500 monthly to 125 people without conditions. Preliminary evaluations were positive. Recipients of the stipend reported feeling less anxious, spending more time with their family and using the money on things like groceries, utility bills, and credit card debt. In 2020, the mayor of Stockton, Michael D. Tubbs, announced a six-month extension of the program, through January 2021, paid for by a philanthropist interested in making UBI a national priority.41 Evidence from UBI programs in other countries suggests that they can increase happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions and reduce crime.42 Mayor Tubbs founded a network, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, with more than twenty-five mayors from across the country to advance this policy idea—once advocated by Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party—that is gaining traction.43

  Call it restitution, if you will, though I do not offer UBI in poor Black neighborhoods as a substitute for any larger program of reparations for slavery or state exclusion of Black Americans from its wealth-building programs.44 Law professor Katherine Franke argues for collective land ownership strategies in lieu of individual reparations for the legacy of slavery.45 Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, advocates for policies that offer access to civic commodities like housing and education to redress systemic housing discrimination against Black Americans.46 Public health researcher Lawrence Brown proposes reparation and investment in Black neighborhoods subjected to historic trauma due to state policies.47 Similarly, I am arguing for repair of the harms of ghetto construction and continued, present state-sponsored residential caste. Try a UBI program in traumatized hoods, not only because it is morally right but also because it could work. As a descendant myself who sends remittance payments to a struggling relative, I can attest to the transformational power of $500 a month in stabilizing a life and enabling my loved one to rebuild.

  Abolition and repair should go beyond participatory politics to transfer or share resources with historically defunded communities, to build them up and give descendants some agency in how their communities develop and flourish. Forty acres for each newly freed individual was beyond the political will of the United States in 1865, but today, housing activists are demanding collective ownership strategies to solve homelessness and the crisis of affordable housing. In Philadelphia, as the pandemic raged, fifty unhoused families, headed mainly by Black women, moved into vacant homes owned by the local housing authority, a protest borne of desperate need. After a months-long standoff, the housing authority ultimately agreed to transfer the homes to a community land trust and allow the families to stay.48 Seattle recently transferred city-owned property to Black-lead community organizations that provide much needed services in the historically redlined and rapidly gentrifying Central District. One recipient, the Africatown Community Land Trust, was formed to preserve Black cultural heritage and provide affordable housing through acquisition and stewardship of land. Seattle conferred a $1 million grant to improve the transferred property. The city also allocated $100 million to its Equitable Communities Initiative to invest in communities impacted by systemic racism.49 Other cities like New York are trying similar collective ownership innovations to combat displacement of communities of color.50

  Perhaps follow the lead of Lawrence, Massachusetts, which made bus lines from its poorest neighborhoods free. Other cities that have offered free bus lines include Olympia, Washington; Kansas City, Missouri; and Boston.51 Invest in well-resourced, culturally competent education, with greatly reduced class sizes, in high-poverty neighborhood schools. And allow d
escendants in concentrated poverty to be first in line in any lottery for accessing great integrated schools and neighborhoods. Invest in parks and neighborhood centers that offer recreation and human services in poor Black neighborhoods. Descendants should also have no-cost access to community college, GED programs, relevant job training, and connection to actual jobs and healthcare, including mental health and drug treatment if they need it. Free services for the freedom and liberation of descendants, who have been intentionally trapped by the state in hypersegregated poor neighborhoods.

  An education example: NBA legend LeBron James supported a new school for children in Akron, Ohio. The Chosen Ones for this school were students who had performed between the 10th and 25th percentile on standardized tests in second grade. At the “I Promise School,” children who might have been labeled “worst” are celebrated daily. They and their parents are supported with extras. James’s family foundation donated about $600,000 to enable this public school to hire more teachers, reduce class sizes, and provide after-school programming and tutors. His foundation also covers the cost of a family resource center located at school where parents can access GED instruction, work counseling, health, and legal services. It also stocks a room with food, clothing, and supplies where parents can enter and take what they need. In its first year, I Promise students made extraordinary gains on standardized tests—90 percent of them scored in the 99th percentile for improvement, meeting and exceeding individual goals in math and reading.52 A transformed education politics would mean that we would not have to rely on celebrities or foundations to mitigate school inequality. Taxpayers and school districts would provide extra support and care in all high-poverty schools, even as we fight to prevent any school from being overwhelmed by poverty.

  These are just a few of the possibilities. Once descendants are asked what they and their communities need to prosper, they should play a role in charting community transformation. The answers will vary with the community. In Baltimore, the citizen advisory committees that toiled on plans for development around their proposed station for the Red Line would likely argue that the Red Line should be built as planned and that descendants from their neighborhoods should receive priority for the jobs it creates. They might also argue for fully funding and exceeding the proposals of the Kirwan Commission for Baltimore’s apartheid schools.

  The movement for Black Lives and other Black-led organizations have proposed policies and demanded transformation and repair.53 Some succeeded, like Milwaukee, in procuring reallocations in 2020. Austin and Los Angeles cut $150 million from their police department’s budgets. New York City reallocated $1 billion from policing to mental health, homelessness, and educational services. San Francisco reallocated $120 million to invest in the city’s Black residents.54 This movement caught up to intellectuals who had called for abolition of incarceration and militarized police departments.55 It is a continuation of four centuries of resistance, for abolition of anti-Black institutions. New generations, less tired, more radical, have taken up the mantle. No justice, no peace, indeed.

  We need to dismantle systems of private policing of Black folk. Some advocate penalizing racially discriminatory use of 911 calls; New York State recently adopted such a law.56 Among many transformative new policies, repair would mean that when a descendant calls 911 for help, they actually receive care and protection, not surveillance, harm, or the threat of eviction or death. Transformation will have occurred when an officer sees a young man running and the officer knows his name and says, “Have a nice run, Jamal,” or if he is a stranger in distress, “Young man, what is wrong? May I help you?”

  That said, the true culprit in creating residential caste is the federal government—a near-century-old legacy. National government has also been captured and gridlocked by the dogmas and gerrymandered structures of the caste system it sponsored. But multihued citizens mobilize and run for office. Demographic change and accelerating political engagement by women, particularly Black women, and communities of color do not augur well for politicians still mired in white-identity politics. A tipping point, now or soon, could restore our national political institutions to promoting the common good.

  An unshackled Congress could also abolish anti-Black policies and processes it set in motion and repair continuing damage to descendants. Scholars and advocates have argued that because federal, redlined, mortgage-insurance programs invested hundreds of billions (in present dollars) in pro-white wealth-building, new investments should be allocated now to Black communities. Legal scholar Rachel Godsil called for an immediate $60 billion investment in communities hit hardest by COVID-19, financed by repealing tax breaks for large corporations that were included in the first federal COVID relief package.57 Others, like Senator Cory Booker, focus on targeted investment in redlined communities, including baby bonds for newborn descendants.58

  Bolder still, Congress could atone for the federal legacy of promoting segregation by enacting a law that bans exclusionary zoning—local laws that privilege single-family homes and exclude denser, affordable housing. Congress could condition federal infrastructure or other spending on measurable local progress in creating affordable housing in high-opportunity areas. Congress could adopt spending formulas that guarantee that areas of persistent poverty receive their fair share of federal resources. And it could eliminate the $23 billion gap in what America spends on white versus nonwhite school districts by nearly tripling existing funding for the Title I program for high-poverty schools.

  The five decades of ghetto mythologizing that I described in this book will have been fully disrupted when the president of the United States uses the office’s pulpit to speak honestly and transparently about the federal government’s legacy of pro-white and anti-Black racism, helping these ideas for repair become mainstream. President Biden has moved in this direction. In his inaugural address, he acknowledged America’s long dance between its founding ideal of universal human equality and supremacist ideology. “A cry for racial justice some four hundred years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” he said. For the first time in an inaugural address, a US president said the words “white supremacy” and that we must confront and defeat extremism and domestic terrorism.59

  Hours later, on the same day, Biden began to govern, issuing a flurry of executive orders. Among them, he rescinded the Trump administration’s harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training for federal agencies and contractors. He abolished Trump’s 1776 Commission that attempted to shape American education by denying the role of white supremacy in American history. And he signed an executive order to promote racial equity. The White House’s Domestic Policy Council—led by the formidable former UN ambassador Susan E. Rice—was tasked with steering all federal agencies to root out “systemic racism” and embed fairness in all its decision-making processes and programs.

  The equity order directs federal agencies to assess, report on, and plan for removing systemic barriers to opportunities “for people of color and other underserved groups.” It calls on the federal government, where legally permissible, to “allocate resources to address the historic failure to invest sufficiently, justly, and equally in underserved communities” and tasks the director of the Office of Management and Budget to work with agencies to make that happen. Critically, the order creates a data working group to study best methods for measuring progress.60 Only by collecting data and paying attention to where federal dollars are spent can the US government disrupt the racial redlining it institutionalized.

  In a speech promoting this ambitious, government-wide racial equity agenda, Biden confronted directly the central message of dog-whistling, the myth “that America is a zero-sum game . . . [that] ‘If you get ahead, I fall behind’ . . . [or worse] ‘If I hold you down, I lift myself up.’” Invoking economic studies and common sense, Biden declared that our nation is “morally deprived because of systemic racism” but also “less prosperous . . . less successful . . . less se
cure.”61 The equity order noted that closing racial gaps in wages and access to credit and higher education would add $5 trillion to the American economy over the next five years.62

  The Biden administration must also restore and enforce the Obama-era rule to affirmatively further fair housing, along with other fair housing, fair lending, and anti-racist policies that the Trump administration gutted. It should continue and expand the Department of Justice’s role in investigating police departments for systemic civil rights violations. The federal government should aggressively enforce existing and restored civil rights protections and issue new guidelines that promote inclusion and equity.

  Whatever proposals for repair that win consensus, they could be paid for in part by repealing recent excessive tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations and cutting excessive investments in segregation and punitive strategies that exacerbate racial inequality. All levels of government have a moral obligation to stop investing in segregation, to stop doubling down on practices born of a long, sinister, racist past. The federal government, too, should invest in new institutions and policies that support a virtuous cycle of inclusion, humanization, and repair. All levels of government should actively promote not only anti-racism but integration. And ascending coalitions must continue to organize, win elections, and hold government accountable for this work.

  I end with a personal note to the people for whom I wrote this book. As an elder once told a room full of Black alumni of my undergraduate alma mater: Love is our wealth. Whatever the state and non-descendants do to and think of us, we must love ourselves and lift each other up, particularly our brothers and sisters who are being crushed under the weight of supremacist institutions.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS