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  • Published: 22 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9780807007167
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 312
  • RRP: $37.99

White Space, Black Hood

Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality




A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.


Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks.

Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

  • Published: 22 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9780807007167
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 312
  • RRP: $37.99

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Praise for White Space, Black Hood

“While extensively documented and amply footnoted, Cashin’s survey remains compelling and accessible to a general readership. A resonant, important argument that White supremacy and racial division poison life in our cities.” —Kirkus Reviews "Cashin’s levelheaded reform suggestions draw from real-world success stories, such as an outreach program in Richmond, Calif., where gun violence plummeted after “violence-prone” young men were given access to therapy, job training, and a monthly stipend. This is a well-researched and persuasive guide to a major source of inequity in the U.S. " —Publishers Weekly “Cashin’s study of the racial foundations of residential castes is an accessible and compelling read that balances historical documents with personal narratives.” —Library Journal “This well-researched and accessibly written volume examines the government-created system of residential caste in the US. Cashin also provides ideas for the abolition of these practices to create a more equitable future for all.” —Ms. Magazine, “September 2021 Reads for the Rest of Us, 9/1” “In White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, Sheryll Cashin demonstrates how durable and pervasive anti-Black rhetoric has been in American thought from the days of Thomas Jefferson to the era of Donald Trump . . . . Cashin explains how racial presumptions once used to justify enslavement eventually led to mandatory segregation in housing.” —Washington Post "In the brilliant and important new book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, Georgetown law professor, Sheryll Cashin, identifies and condemns three methods of white supremacy at work throughout the United States: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding in the form of commercial exclusion and educational apartheid, and stereotype-driven surveillance." —Counterpunch "Like slavery and Jim Crow, the Black hood has in many ways been shaped by white supremacy. Politicians from both sides of the aisle, people of all races and nationalities propagated and appropriated this idea of “the ghetto” and the myths around it as a way to “justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces.” Based on nearly 20 years of fieldwork and research in cities such as Baltimore, New York, St. Louis and Chicago, Cashin looks at the housing disparities and redlining as it relates to schools, policing and access to transportation. White Space, Black Hood calls for the abolition of state-sanctioned systemic oppression and calls for a new infrastructure of opportunities in poor Black neighborhoods." —The RootWhite Space, Black Hood makes a powerful case that ‘geography as caste is destroying America.’ It will be impossible to heal the soul of the country without addressing the defining problem this extraordinary book illuminates.” —Richard D. Kahlenberg, New Republic “Sheryll Cashin is one of the most important civil rights scholars of our time, and White Space, Black Hood is her magnum opus, the searing culmination of decades of research about the devastating consequences of segregation. Cashin builds on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste to take down liberal and conservative orthodoxies on race. (White) America is not ready for this book.” —Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men “In this brilliant and nuanced new volume, Sheryll Cashin exposes the ways in which American policy decisions, from the early twentieth c