White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  43. Massey, “The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” 578.

  44. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.

  45. Massey and Tannen, “A Research Note on Trends in Black Hypersegregation,” 1031–32.

  46. See chapter 8 on anti-Black surveillance.

  47. Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 127–66; Abby Goodnough, “Harvard Professor Jailed; Officer Is Accused of Bias,” New York Times, July 20, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21gates.html; Deanna Paul, “Police Handcuffed a Black Man Who Was Moving into His Own Home. Now He Wants Them Fired,” Washington Post, March 22, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/22/police-handcuffed-black-man-who-was-moving-into-his-own-home-now-he-wants-them-fired. See also chapter 8 of this book on anti-Black surveillance.

  48. Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” 929.

  49. Pattillo, Black Picket Fences. See also Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class.”

  50. Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” 921.

  51. Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” 927.

  52. Sharkey, 930, 935–38. See also Karyn Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  53. See Paul Jargowsky, “Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s,” Brookings, May 1, 2003, https://www.brookings.edu/research/stunning-progress-hidden-problems-the-dramatic-decline-of-concentrated-poverty-in-the-1990s; William Julius Wilson, “Another Look at the Truly Disadvantaged,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Winter 1991–92): 642–43.

  54. Paul A. Jargowsky, Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium: Changes in the Prevalence, Composition, and Location of High-Poverty Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: Century Foundation/Rutgers Center for Urban Research and Education, 2013).

  55. US Census Bureau, “Race, Hispanic or Latino by Race, Poverty Status in for Children Under 18, Poverty Status in for Population Age 18 to 64, and Poverty Status in for Population Age 65 and Over, 2012–2016.” Prepared by Social Explorer, accessed July 4, 2018.

  56. “Who Can Live in Chicago?,” Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, https://voorheescenter.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/who-can-live-in-chicago-part-i, accessed September 23, 2020

  57. Kimberly Jones, “How Can We Win,” YouTube video, 6:21, June 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9_qGOa9Go.

  58. Jargowsky, Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium.

  59. Massey and Rugh, “Segregation in Post-Civil Rights America,” 205.

  CHAPTER 4: GHETTO MYTHS THEY TOLD A NATION

  1. Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019).

  2. Josh Levin, “The Welfare Queen,” Slate, December 19, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html.

  3. Levin, The Queen, 142; Josh Levin, “The Myth Was $150,000 in Fraud. The Real Story Is More Interesting,” New York Times, May 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion/sunday/welfare-queen-myth-reagan.html.

  4. Levin, The Queen, 115; Levin, “The Welfare Queen.”

  5. Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57. See Lee Atwater’s quote describing Reagan’s tactic of using racially charged language to incite white voters.

  6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On Race-Hustling,” Atlantic, October 3, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/on-race-hustling/263210.

  7. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics, 57; Coates, “On Race-Hustling.”

  8. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics, 57.

  9. Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), chapter 5.

  10. See generally DeParle, American Dream.

  11. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics, 59.

  12. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 22–23.

  13. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics, 67–68.

  14. Levin, “The Welfare Queen.”

  15. George E. Peterson et al., The Reagan Block Grants: What Have We Learned? (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1986), 1; Timothy Conlan, New Federalism: Intergovernmental Reform from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1988), 178.

  16. Brockell, “She Was Stereotyped as the ‘Welfare Queen.’”

  17. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics, 66.

  18. Cashin, Place, Not Race, 7–9.

  19. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 320.

  20. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Cashin, The Failures of Integration, 320.

  21. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 44; Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

  22. David Stoesz, “The Fall of the Industrial City: The Reagan Legacy for Urban Policy,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 19, no. 1 (1992): 149–67, 153.

  23. Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), 148, quoting Washington Post, January 29, 1976.

  24. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 49.

  25. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 53.

  26. See, e.g., Forman, Locking Up Our Own; John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

  27. Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (New York: New Press, 2017), 69–73.

  28. Elise Viebeck, “How an Early Biden Crime Bill Created the Sentencing Disparity for Crack and Cocaine Trafficking,” Washington Post, July 28, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-an-early-biden-crime-bill-created-the-sentencing-disparity-for-crack-and-cocaine-trafficking/2019/07/28/5cbb4c98-9dcf-11e9–85d6–5211733f92c7_story.html.

  29. Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133, 95.

  30. “Mass Incarceration,” American Civil Liberties Union, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration.

  31. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 53, 142.

  32. Laura I. Appleman, “The Treatment-Industrial Complex: Alternative Corrections, Private Prison Companies, and Criminal Justice Debt,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 55 (2020): 40–47, https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/09/Appleman.pdf; Tim Requarth, “How Private Equity Is Turning Public Prisons into Big Profits,” Nation, April 30, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/prison-privatization-private-equity-hig; see also Jacob Whiton, “In Too Many American Communities, Mass Incarceration Has Become a Jobs Program,” Brookings, June 18, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/06/18/in-too-many-american-communities-mass-incarceration-has-become-a-jobs-program; Kara Gotsch and Vinay Basti, “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” Sentencing Project, August 2, 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons; Brigette Sarabi and Edwin Bender, The Prison Payoff: The Role of Politics and Private Prisons in the Incarceration Boom (Western Prison Project, 2000), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/Prison_Payoff_Report_WPP_2000.pdf.

  33. Bryan Stevenson, “Opinion: This Is the Conversation About Race We Need to Have Now,” Ideas.Ted.com, August 17, 2017, https://ideas.ted.com/opinion-this-is-the-conversation-about-race-that-we-need-to-have-now.

  34. P
eter Edelman, Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America (New York: New Press, 2017).

  35. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 391–502.

  36. Felicia Pratto, Jim Sidanius, and Shana Levin, “Social Dominance Theory and the Dynamics of Intergroup Relations: Taking Stock and Looking Forward,” European Review of Social Psychology 17 (2006): 271–320.

  37. Elsewhere, I have surveyed Jefferson’s specious arguments regarding the alleged inferiority of Africans to whites and Indigenous people, his implied justifications for slavery, and his economic dependency on the institution; see Cashin, Loving, 55–58, citing Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 264–67.

  38. Alexey Zhavoronkov and Alexey Salikov, “The Concept of Race in Kant Lectures on Anthropology,” International Journal of Philosophy 7 (2018): 275–92.

  39. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races,” 1775.

  40. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 212.

  41. See Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

  42. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 91.

  43. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 48.

  44. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts.

  45. Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, March 1965).

  46. See, e.g., William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1971).

  47. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: First Free Press, 1994); Charles Murray, “Drug Free-Zones,” Current 36 (1990): 19–24.

  48. “Charles Murray,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray.

  49. Nicole Hemmer, “‘Scientific Racism’ Is on the Rise on the Right. But It’s Been Lurking There for Years,” Vox, March 28, 2017, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/3/28/15078400/scientific-racism-murray-alt-right-black-muslim-culture-trump; Jacquelyne Johnson Jackson, “The Bell Curve: What’s All the Fuss About?” The Black Scholar 25, no. 1 (1995): 11-20, 17; Jeb Bush, interview with Richard Lowry, National Review Ideas Summit, C-SPAN, April 30, 2015, https://www.c-span.org/video/?325690-1/national-review-institute-2015-ideas-summit; Robert Pear, “Q&A: Charles Murray; Of Babies and Stick,” New York Times, April 11, 1986, 11; Juan Williams, “Author’s Attacks on ‘Great Society’ Shift Social Debate,” Washington Post, May 28, 1985, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/05/28/authors-attacks-on-great-society-shift-social-debate/584fa524-f516-4209-8c0b-35b689ce8aaf; Charles Murray, “Losing Ground Two Years Later,” Cato Journal 6, no. 1 (1986): 19–28, Law-georgetown-csm.symplicity.com/students/app/document-library/content/e9b2224b4a167e697f0453ff7e9c4c55.

  50. Gates Jr., Stony the Road; see also my discussion in chapter 1 regarding Black enclaves in Baltimore in which W. E. B. Du Bois and other elites resided.

  51. William Julius Wilson, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse, The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  52. Randall Kennedy, “The State, Criminal Law, and Racial Discrimination: A Comment,” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 1255–68; Justice Clarence Thomas, Dissenting Opinion, Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41 (1999).

  53. Paul Butler, “Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System,” Yale Law Review 105 (1995): 677–725.

  54. See generally Cora Daniels, Ghettonation: Dispatches from America’s Culture War (New York: Broadway Books, 2007).

  55. See Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

  56. Beth Schwartzapfel and Bill Keller, “Willie Horton Revisited,” Marshall Project, June 13, 2015, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/13/willie-horton-revisited.

  57. Schwartzapfel and Bill Keller, “Willie Horton Revisited”; Roger Simon, “The GOP and Willie Horton: Together Again,” Politico, May 19, 2015, https://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-willie-horton-118061.

  58. Richard Craig, Polls, Expectations, and Elections: TV News Making in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 66.

  59. Peter Barker, “Bush Made Willie Horton an Issue in 1988, and the Racial Scars Are Still Fresh,” New York Times, December 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/bush-willie-horton.html.

  60. Matthew R. Pembleton, “George H. W. Bush’s Biggest Failure? The War on Drugs.” Washington Post, December 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/06/george-hw-bushs-biggest-failure-war-drugs; Tracy Thompson, “D.C. Student Is Given 10 Years in Drug Case,” Washington Post, November 1, 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1990/11/01/dc-student-is-given-10-years-in-drug-case/2384c4eb-8871-4d28-a4f0-a3919335c311.

  61. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 55.

  62. Monte Piliawsky wrote of the move as one of many tactics in the Clinton campaign that was “a subtly orchestrated exercise in Realpolitik that bordered on covert racism.” Monte Piliawksy, “Racism or Realpolitik? The Clinton Administration and African-Americans,” Black Scholar 24, no. 2 (1994): 2–10, 6; many Blacks saw it as simple pandering. Niall Stanage, “The Clintons and Race: A Timeline,” Hill, June 23, 2015, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/245914-the-clintons-and-race-a-timeline. Christopher Hitchens reflected on this moment as a maneuver in Clinton’s own “southern strategy.” Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (London: Verso: 1999), 24.

  63. Schwartzapfel and Keller, “Willie Horton Revisited.”

  64. Michelle Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” Nation, February 10, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes.

  65. David A. Super, “The Cruelty of Trump’s Poverty Policy,” New York Times, July 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/trump-poverty-policy.html.

  66. Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass, Capitalism: Should You Buy It? An Invitation to Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 219.

  67. Super, “The Cruelty of Trump’s Poverty Policy.”

  68. Toni Morrison, “Comment,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, September 28, 1998, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543.

  69. “(1993) William J. Clinton, ‘The Freedom to Die,’” Black Past, March 12, 2012, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1993-william-j-clinton-freedom-die.

  70. Farah Stockman, “On Crime Bill and the Clintons, Young Blacks Clash with Parents,” New York Times, April 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/o4/18/us/politics/hillary-bill-clinton-crime-bill.html.

  71. “(1993) William J. Clinton, ‘The Freedom to Die.’”

  72. Presidential Statement on Signing Legislation Rejecting U.S. Sentencing Commission Recommendations, 31 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1961 (October 30, 1995).

  73. Heidi Gillstrom, “Clinton’s ‘Superpredators’ Comment Most Damaging by Either Candidate,” Hill, September 30, 2016, https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/crime/298693-hillary-clintons-superpredators-still-the-most-damaging-insult-by.

  74. Michelle Mark, “Where Hillary Clinton Stands on Criminal Justice,” Business Insider, October 8, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/where-hillary-clinton-stands-on-criminal-justice-2016–10.

  75. William J. Bennett, John D. Dilulio Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty—and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

  76. Elizabeth Becker, “As Ex-Theorist on Young ‘Superpredators,’ Bush Aide Has Regrets,” New York Times, February 9, 2001, https://www.ny
times.com/2001/02/09/us/as-ex-theorist-on-young-superpredators-bush-aide-has-regrets.html.

  77. “Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice,” Brennan Center for Justice, April 27, 2015, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/solutions-american-leaders-speak-out-criminal-justice.

  78. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 17.

  79. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 139.

  80. Obama, Dreams from My Father.

  81. Julie Bosman, “Obama Sharply Assails Absent Black Fathers,” New York Times, June 16, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/politics/15cnd-obama.html; “Why Jesse’s Testy: Obama’s ‘Tough Love’ for Black Community,” New York, July 10, 2008, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2008/07/why_jesses_testy_obamas_tough.html; Vanessa Williams, “To Critics, Obama’s Scolding Tone with Black Audiences Is Getting Old,” Washington Post, May 20, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/to-critics-obamas-scolding-tone-with-black-audiences-is-getting-old/2013/05/20/4b267352-c191-11e2-bfdb-3886a561c1ff_story.html; Derecka Purnell, “Why Does Obama Scold Black Boys?,” New York Times, February 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/my-brothers-keeper-obama.html.

  82. BET Staff, “Obama Delivers Some Tough Love,” BET, March 3, 2008, https://www.bet.com/news/news/2008/03/03/newsarticlepoliticsbarackobamatexasspeech.html.

  83. Bosman, “Obama Sharply Assails Absent Black Fathers.”

  84. Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  85. Michael Eric Dyson, “Obama’s Rebuke of Absentee Black Fathers,” Time, June 19, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1816485,00.html.

  86. Jo Jones and William D. Mosher, “Fathers’ Involvement with Their Children: United States, 2006–2010,” National Health Statistics Reports 71 (2013).