Please Join Us
Book Signing with Sheryll Cashin
White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality
February 26th, 2022, from 2:00 – 4:00 PM
Eventbrite tickets required. Available HERE.
*Mask and Vaccination required*
At 1429 Iris St NW, Washington DC 20012
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.
“Breonna Taylor – Her Life Matters” by Sheryll Cashin, in our current exhibition, “The Colors of Form and History.”
Sheryll Cashin studied painting for years at the Corcoran School of Art, and was an active member of A. Salon, Ltd. artists’ cooperative (now known as DC Arts Studios) and in 1996 began selling large acrylic paintings of famous and ordinary African Americans. Early collectors of Cashin’s work included Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Ambassador Susan Rice and executive Robert Mallett. Known as an author and law professor at Georgetown Law, Cashin’s latest book, White Space, Black Hood illuminates residential caste and the systems of American racial inequality. “I made these collages as an act of self-care in a time of ugliness. In works like, Breonna Taylor, Her Life Mattered I surround Black women in nature and imagine them being healed. I was healed as I produced them. Beauty and internal peace are their own form of resistance.”
