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On Nov. 5 Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin presented her new book, titled, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, at UC Berkeley, in the first in-person event organized by the O&B Institute in more than a year and half. Her talk was followed by a conversation with john a. powell, OBI director, and moderated by Stephen Menendian, OBI assistant director who leads the Institute's research on racial residential segregation.

Transcript

Stephen Menendian:
Well, welcome and good afternoon, everyone. So nice to see you. This is our first live event in two years. There's nothing like being with other people, right? It's totally different experience. So good to see you. My name is Stephen Menendian. I am the director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute, and it's a real privilege to moderate this discussion today and presentation with Professor Cashin.

Stephen Menendian:
This is a really important topic. Let me give you the quick formal bios and I'll add a quick note and then we'll Professor Cashin come up here to preview her exciting book. So Sheryll Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse professor of law, civil rights, and social justice at Georgetown University. She is an acclaimed author who writes about the US struggle with racism and inequality. Her books, which there are many and are on the back table here. Only a few of them are back there relative to her output, has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for nonfiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for nonfiction and an editor's choice in the New York Times book review.

Stephen Menendian:
She is an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, and was a law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. She also worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on community development in inner city neighborhoods. She is a contributing editor for Politico Magazine, where she writes phenomenal articles. Google Politico, Cashin, and you won't be disappointed. And resides in Washington DC with her husband and twin sons. You can follow her at sheryllcashin.com and on Twitter at Sheryll Cashin.

Stephen Menendian:
Also joining her this afternoon for what is going to be just a remarkable and deeply insightful conversation is john a. powell, the director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. He is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, and democracy. At the Institute, he brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policy makers to identify and eliminate barriers to an inclusive just and sustainable society. He holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in equity and inclusion, and is a professor of law, African American studies and ethnic studies.

Stephen Menendian:
Previously, he was the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and at the Ohio State University, where he held the Gregory H. Williams chair in civil rights and civil liberties. I was also going to reference how Sheryll described him in her book, but I couldn't find the quote on the fly. I think she called him a champion of opportunity and a visionary leader, which I can attest to as well.

Stephen Menendian:
Before I invite Professor Cashin up here I just want to note that what a remarkable and unique voice she is and an important voice in this moment. I try to read about a book on race every month and I can pick out her voice just by reading a passage. It's so important and so unique. And she has such an important, clear perspective and a powerful case that she's making in this book. So I just, couldn't be more excited to invite her up here to share her thoughts and her argument. So without further ado.

Sheryll Cashin:
Thank you so much, Steve. That's so kind of you. I feel like I'm coming home because you know, it was like 20 years ago with my first book this man invited me to speak at Ohio State and you were there too, I believe. Right? And I come, I'd never met him before and this man looks like Moses. Right? And when I was speaking and talking to him, it felt like he should have written the book because he already knew everything about the subject. And as you'll see, there's a lot of your work on opportunity housing, Stephen, your work is cited there. You guys have been such leading lights for me. I'll say that.

Sheryll Cashin:
And I also, I have to recognize a dear old friend. 40 years. 40 years ago, we were graduate students at Oxford, my friend, Jeff Gibbs. He's a Cal Berkeley law school alum, but he's also a special counsel to the university and I'm very moved that he came out and I'm going to be shouting out to someone else special in the end of my presentation and you'll see him here.

Sheryll Cashin:
So let me get started and I want to thank you. So tech people, it has gone off. Maybe, let me see if I can get it back up. Control, alt, delete. Where's the delete? There we go. I don't know the passwords, Marc. And I also want to just thank you guys for coming out. It's really, really wonderful for you to take your time to be here. And then I understand we have quite a group online watching us right now. So thank you.

Sheryll Cashin:
All right. Well, let me dive in. In this book, I argue that each time this country seems to have put to bed a peculiar black subordinating institution it has created another one. From slavery to Jim Crow. I could have included mass incarceration in there to the iconic ghetto, which I prefer to say hood, which is a term of affection for me, but technically a ghetto is any neighborhood where more than 40% of the people who live there are poor. But you know, it's also a cultural stereotype, but each of these peculiar anti-black institutions have been animated by a dogma, a stereotype that's designed to justify, maintain, and creating and maintaining the institution.

Sheryll Cashin:
All of them obviously are institutions of white supremacy. This book is about the peculiar experience of Black Americans, subordinated by segregation and what I call residential caste. It was created to contain Black Americans, but all of us today are ensnared by it. Okay. And so, what is reside residential caste? I said that we, my shorthand, we in this country, we government over-invest and excludes in affluent white space and disinvest and contains, and frankly, preys on people in high poverty, black and brown spaces.

Sheryll Cashin:
Those are the extremes of residential castes, but everybody in between those two extremes has quite a bit of difficulty accessing opportunity because of three persistent, current anti-black processes: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and surveillance. And it took me two decades to figure this out. I am a law professor. I'm also a self-taught historian. And I also happened to have a degree in electrical engineering. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And I brought a systems analysis to try to understand this. Okay. So I'm going to make it easy for you. Took me two decades to figure this out. My law school came up with this beautiful video, which tells the story of residential caste in four minutes. And I'm going to play the video for you, and that'll make it much easier for me to talk about other details. Let's hope this works. Okay. Here we go.

Sheryll Cashin:
Opportunity. If high opportunity- Okay, wait a minute. We have to go back to the beginning. Here we go.

Sheryll Cashin:
America's residential past is destroying-

Sheryll Cashin:
Can you hear it?

Sheryll Cashin:
... opportunity. If high opportunity is sequestered only in certain places, neither cities nor struggling suburbs nor far out rural hamlets are an engine of opportunity in this country anymore. We're not the land of opportunity in this system of residential caste.

Sheryll Cashin:
So I've been a professor at Georgetown law for 25 years, and I've written a new book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding And Segregation In The Age Of Inequality. And in that book, I'm shining a light on American residential caste.

Sheryll Cashin:
So American residential caste is a system that was intentionally constructed to create affluent white spaces separated and apart from high poverty, black neighborhoods. We overinvest in and exclude in affluent white space and we disinvest and prey upon the people trapped in the hood.

Sheryll Cashin:
So there are three anti-Black processes that undergird residential paths, boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. Boundary maintenance is a polite word for segregation. The most persistent types of neighborhoods in large metropolitan or even medium metropolitan areas is affluent white space and high poverty, minority neighborhoods, particularly Black neighborhoods. They have persisted and the boundaries to those two types of neighborhoods have gotten harder. We're more segregated now than we were 20 years ago at these polar extremes.

Sheryll Cashin:
Opportunity hoarding is over investing in affluent majority white space and disinvesting elsewhere, particularly in Black neighborhoods. We tend to use exclusionary zoning, neighborhood assignment, the boundaries of jurisdictions to hoard the opportunities there. Golden infrastructure and schools, wonderful transportation, job-rich social networks. Everyone else who's excluded from those high opportunity environments subsidizes that, right, through taxation, through gasoline taxes. That gorgeous golden infrastructure is paid for and subsidized by the people who are excluded.

Sheryll Cashin:
And then the third stereotype-driven surveillance by police and by private citizens. As with slavery and Jim Crow, a lot of non-Black citizens have been conscripted into policing Black bodies, stereotype-driven surveillance is driven by this idea that that kind of behavior is deserved in majority Black neighborhoods. Police go through there with a lens. Every young man is presumed a thug rather than a citizen.

Sheryll Cashin:
The beauty of once you understand the processes they actually provide the way forward. You basically abolish and reverse them. Inclusion rather than exclusion with boundary maintenance. Giving historically defunded neighborhoods priority in investing rather than opportunity hoarding and disinvesting in Blackness.

Sheryll Cashin:
Humanization and care rather than stereotype-driven surveillance. A city that's gone through abolition repair, what I imagine, envision is that they will have returned to beings agents of opportunity, particularly for poor people in poor neighborhoods. See them as assets and give them a chance to be an agent in their own liberation.

Sheryll Cashin:
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And I thought it was easier to play the video with my sort of tired self. I got in very late last night, but let me just say a few more things and then we can begin the discussion. Go back to slideshow and play from the current slide. It's all good. Right? All right. Okay.

Sheryll Cashin:
So coming to residential caste. How many of you have read The Color Of Law? Okay. Quite a few people. I'd like to have some of his mojo, right, in terms of book sale. So thank you for being here, but here's the point. The primary response to millions of Black American great migrants leaving the south to escape Jim Crow moving north Midwest and west was to contain them in their own neighborhoods. The Color Of Law talks about that. I'm not going to get in all to the nuts and bolts, but federal and state and local policies intentionally contained Black people.

Sheryll Cashin:
And then they marked their neighborhoods as hazardous. Marking blackness as hazardous that's redlining. And for eight, nine decades on, we have a fed study in my book, which shows that the Black neighborhoods marked as hazardous eight decades on. They correlate with disinvestment to this day and segregation. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And what happens is people associate the conditions in those neighborhoods with the Black people who live there and we tell stories to justify that. And so, as with previous institutions, we have stereotypes to justify laws and policies. And then people, the average people get conscripted in those stereotypes. And so it becomes self-perpetuating. Once you institutionalize an anti-Black institution, it becomes very, very hard to disrupt it. All right.

Sheryll Cashin:
So boundary maintenance. This map illustrates better than anything else I think and I have it in the book what I'm talking about. This is Houston. Every yellow star on there is a housing project subsidized by the low income housing tax credit. Every blue star is a public housing project. And the pale area is the majority white area of Western Houston. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And I can show you a map like this in most major metropolitan areas, right? And you see highways, it's something physically, either a highway or a river or a mountain that tend to be boundaries between white and Black space and I talk about this in the book. They had never built a public housing project anywhere in white space in the city of Houston.

Sheryll Cashin:
And in fact, in a lawsuit, the city, and as part of a settlement admitted that they had concentrated more than 71% of all government subsidized housing in only five of its 88 neighborhoods. Right? And if you remember nothing else that I've said here, concentrated black poverty is an intentional government sponsored institution and you would not, and this is the central message of my book, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
You could not have a fluent poverty free white space without concentrating poverty elsewhere. So all of the policies that concentrate poverty are by design also constructing affluent white space, right? And places like this have the best of everything. And I know, or at least have some sense of what the hood is like. So that's boundary maintenance, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
But what do I do in my book, and thank you for mentioning my boys, right? I bring a lot of personal passion to this project. I'm a daughter of civil rights advocates from Huntsville, Alabama. I try to show that there's never been any group in the world that's been oppressed that doesn't mount resistance, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And so I feature my people and I refer to my people as descendants. And let me be very specific. I'm talking about Black American descendants of slavery, right? I am that. I'm descendants of enslaved and slave owners, but I call the people trapped in the hood in particular descendants, which for me, is a term of affection in acknowledging the unbroken continuum from slavery. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And then I show some of our descendant freedom fighters. Almost every chapter starts with examples. And so these are two guys. I start with Baltimore. Chapter one. Why did I choose Baltimore as my case study in American caste? Baltimore was the city with the highest free black, urban population during the antebellum era, right? That's what turned Frederick Douglass on. Frederick Douglass saw these free people walking around and said, "I want some of that." Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
And Black people, Black Americans living in Baltimore at the turn of the century could buy houses wherever they wanted, they could go in the stores, they could try them on. There was no regime of caste oppressing them, but it's only with the great migration and the hysteria when Black people start to arrive in larger and larger numbers that racial zoning and all these other things happen.

Sheryll Cashin:
Well, I feature this guy W. Ashbie Hawkins who was Thurgood Marshall before there was any Thurgood Marshall, right, showing him, these are both lawyers, they're brothers in line and George W.F. McMechen, right? He had the temerity to buy one of the finest homes on one of the finest blocks in Baltimore and that's what got the whole thing started.

Sheryll Cashin:
And I show them as resistance fighters and all the way straight through, I show the cumulative blunt force trauma that the Black neighborhoods of the butterfly. East/west Baltimore called to this day, the Black butterfly in contrast to the white L, which goes right through.

Sheryll Cashin:
Baltimore, has been led by a series of Black mayors. To this day, Baltimore, the majority of Blacks on the city council are Black. And yet they found when they did their own equity analysis, that they were spending four times as much resources in white areas to their own horror. Right? Now they're trying to disrupt it. And that's what I'm talking about these systems, but I show all of that, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
Yes?

Audience member:
Can you go back and make clear the residential pattern of segregation?

Sheryll Cashin:
What do you mean? In Baltimore?

Audience member:
Yeah. In Baltimore.

Sheryll Cashin:
What do you mean? This is east and west... Oh, I'm sorry. The darker it is, the blacker, it is. Is that not clear?

Audience member:
Alright, so...

Sheryll Cashin:
And this over here is the HOLC red line map from the thirties, which marked all of the black neighborhoods with red, with a D. I apologize. Is it clear now?

Audience member:
Okay. I understand now, thank you.

Sheryll Cashin:
Okay. All right. Maps in the book. You can get it in the back. Okay. It's cumulative blunt force trauma, so you get Negro removal and you get highways. This is the highway to nowhere, which was run through a black neighborhood and stopped by Barbara Mikulski. I just show this story and then I kind of show the struggle of the black American belonging. Tulsa, the Watts Riots. This is white people rioting killing Black people. This is Black people rioting after police attack them.

Sheryll Cashin:
But again, I show descendants, Dorothy Gatreaux. A woman I interviewed and spent a chapter on who's Lakia Barnett, who's a client of a healthcare clinic at our law school who was a married mother of three who found herself homeless. And I show her Kafkaesque battle just to find some decent stable housing in Washington, DC, even though she had a prized HUD voucher.

Sheryll Cashin:
All right. And then, just to cover the sweep of the book. This is Dr. Darryl Atwell, a Howard trained anesthesiologist. He leads the chapter on Black surveillance. I show what his experience is like being preyed upon by police, even though he doesn't live in the hood.

Sheryll Cashin:
And then the final chapter, which is entitled Abolition and Repair leads with the story of DeVone Boggan, who is in the room. Raise your hand, DeVone. There he is. Right? And I must say, so DeVone Boggan who's the descendant of great migrants. Where was it from DeVone? What was it, from Alabama? What? From Alabama to Albion, Michigan. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
But Richmond, California was experiencing some of the worst gun violence in the country, worse than Chicago. And this guy saw the young man who were likely to pull the trigger with a lens of love. And my point with abolition of repair is that the first thing we need to do is change the lens by which we see black people from presumed thug to presumed citizen. And once you do that it frees you up to evidence-based strategies that are likely to be more effective and cheaper than the predation that's visited upon black people.

Sheryll Cashin:
So Devone saw the young men in Richmond who were most likely to pull the trigger as the most potentially powerful trait change agents. And he saw that them as three-dimensional human beings worthy of love and capable of transformation. There was only about two dozen of them. And what do they do? They wrap them in love, A 24/7, 18-month peacemaker fellowship which costs, I think they seeded it with about a million dollars. What do they get? A 55% reduction in gun violence. Meanwhile, and I'll end with this so we can have our conversation, the City of Chicago, the state of Illinois, spends a million dollars per inner city block every four years to incarcerate people there. This is an issue of valuing black people rather than just money.

Sheryll Cashin:
And I'll end with this, I was finishing this book in 2020, and as I was concluding it I thought the hardest step in terms of transformation or abolition repair would be the first one, getting people to see black people with a lens of something other than fear. And this gave me hope, "Yeah, it's been a couple years and we got backlash and struggle. But it still is the case that I think that a critical mass of people, of non-black people, want something better than residential castes and a society premised on separation, fear and frankly, violence. And I'll stop there, yeah.

john a. powell:
Good afternoon.

Audience:
Good afternoon.

john a. powell:
My name is john powell.

john a. powell:
And I had the pleasure of not only reading Sheryll Cashin, but also knowing Sheryll Cashin. And she is really a powerful thinker.

john a. powell:
And we have already participated in a number of struggles together. So I'm just going to make a few comments and then we'll have a discussion back and forth. This is actually not only a powerful book, it's actually emotional in many ways. So I woke this morning, let me take you back a little bit. And I got a text email from Phil Tegeler. I don't know if you have that email.

Sheryll Cashin:
About?

john a. powell:
Mike.

Sheryll Cashin:
Mike, right, right.

john a. powell:
About Mike Miller. Most of you probably don't know who Mike is but you've been influenced by his work, an economist. He wrote a book called Respect, he just died. And I was sitting on another email getting ready to respond that another friend, Tom Henderson, had also recently died. Mike Miller is 98 years old, Tom was 69. And they both, in a sense, were involved in the struggles that Sheryll talks about. And so I haven't really processed it and so I'm sharing it with you right now.

john a. powell:
And part of this that's important is that this is, as someone said, not a sprint, not a marathon, a relay. We have to hand it on to the next generation and the next generation. Because this, this has been going on for a long time and it's going to be going on. And also, just reading about Sheryll's incredible family ... I've written a couple of books but I haven't brought my family in it, so you've already inspired me to start talking about my family in the books more. But this is an incredible, incredible family. And I think many Americans but especially black Americans have these untold stories about the resistance and heroes. And so I want to thank you for sharing that with us and continuing the legacy of your incredible family.

Sheryll Cashin:
Thank you so much.

john a. powell:
But as we think about this legacy, and as Sheryll said, I spent a lot of time in Baltimore. So the cases and the people that are highlighted in the book, Stephen and I spent hours working on the Thompson case out of Baltimore, and in many ways it was the first federal court case where the court applied opportunity mapping which is something that we helped bring to the floor in the '90s but then continued to use and now it's become more of a industry standard. So people like Raj Chetty and others around the country, and the federal government now use it.

john a. powell:
And the whole notion of opportunity hoarding. And so one of the things that we did in that work and continue to do ... Because people, there's a debate about segregation, a lot of people get confused and it's like, "So what if it's segregated? Black people have their neighborhood, white people have their neighborhood, Latinos." They always say, "What's wrong with that?" And it's never simply been about the separation of people. It's been about the distribution of opportunity.

john a. powell:
And what Sheryll reminds us is that it's race, class and geography. And often times we miss the geography part and we wonder out loud, "Well, why don't we just leave black people in West Oakland or Richmond, or East Oakland or East Palo Alto, or Detroit or Baltimore and just invest in it, just put more money in it?" The whole purpose of segregation is to deplete opportunity, it's opportunity stripping, and to take that money and then invest it into white communities.

john a. powell:
So people ask that question and it sounds like a reasonable question. But it's clear when we ask that question, we don't understand the whole function and purpose of segregation because we focus on the people. We say, "Well let's put black people over here and white people over here." White people segregated, too, not in terms of being stripped of opportunity. They're over invested.

john a. powell:
I grew up in Detroit and I'm going back there for Thanksgiving. And many of you heard you talk about my incredible family in Detroit. You go to Detroit now and it's maddening what you see. You see the record of all this money being invested and billionaires building stadiums. And when they build stadiums, for the most part, the first thing they do is they say, "We need public subsidy. We need help. I'm a billionaire but I need help to build a football stadium that will not serve black people."

john a. powell:
When they had one of the big mega sports events in Detroit, they literally told black Detroiters to stay away. Detroit is the blackest large city in the United States. It was 85% black, I don't know if today it is right now. And so they're investing their money, stripping their assets to have a big brouhaha in Detroit and tell the black people, "Can you not come downtown for a few days. Y'all might scare the white people."

john a. powell:
So the other thing that I want to pick up on that's really important, so one, the first is that, again, segregation is about opportunity. It's not simply about people, it's about how we distribute opportunity. So we have opportunity stripping and opportunity hoarding, those two things go together. And for years we studied concentrated poverty and the racial dimensions of concentrated poverty. And what Sheryll is telling us, that we can't study concentrated poverty without understanding its relationship to concentrated wealth. Those two things are related.

john a. powell:
So here's the second thing we want to lift up, the relationship, the relationship. These are critically interdynamic processes. So a lot of times we think we're talking about black people or the black condition, because it's not just people. We're really talking about white people and the white condition. So when we're studying East Oakland, Richmond, we're studying the hills of Berkeley and the hills in beautiful neighborhoods in the hills of San Francisco. So when we are studying what's happening in Hunter's Point we're also studying what's happening in Elmwood, Berkeley. These things are related and that's the thing that we keep missing, that the conditions of segregation in the country and black and white people in particular, all people, all people but particularly black and white people in terms of our history, is powerfully interrelated.

john a. powell:
And that's part of the hope and also the fear. Because in a sense, whiteness has always been about constructing a separate space for white people or so the containment. If we're going to have black people, "Y'all go over there. Don't go too far because we need you to come work in our homes, in our neighborhoods. We need you to take care our children. So don't go too far, just far enough." So the construction of the black hood in white space is the same phenomena. It's the same phenomena.

john a. powell:
And I guess the last point I want to make, the relationship point is really, really important. I just about finished teaching a class on critical race theory. We just had an election and think about this election. And I know this is not partisan and I don't know what your political affiliation, but I would say the new party of white supremacy did pretty well, in the era of George Floyd, the new party of white supremacy. They've rebranded themselves, now they call themselves the Republicans. They used to be called Democrats, these were called the Dixiecrats. But they've always had the same ideology, maintaining and protecting white supremacy.

john a. powell:
And I want to be clear, this is not the same as white people. This is an ideology where the elites weaponize fear. And so just read the paper. They're talking about Trump, the attack on white suburban women. What's the attack? Trump. They want to move affordable housing into the suburbans. And Trump tells you that that's an attack on suburban white women. He doesn't hide it, it's not a dog whistle, he's explicit, "We're trying to maintain white space and Obama and some of his people are trying to disrupt that space."

john a. powell:
So we still have this dynamic going on that sometimes we don't fully understand, that this is a powerful relationship. And so one of the threats become, "You're going to lose your hoarded resource because black people are going to be able to move in." And then what's so wrong with that? What's so scary about that? We still are trading in these stereotypes about black people, criminals, thugs, dangerous.

john a. powell:
And so you saw the clip and I think that was Central Park where a black guy with a Harvard degree can't go look at birds because he's dangerous. And a liberal white Canadian understands that. She didn't take Sheryll's class, she didn't take my class but she understands that you can call the power of the state down on any black person, on a black man if you just use the right words, "White woman in trouble," she doesn't have to say white woman. She has a white voice. But she does say, "An African American is threatening me."

john a. powell:
So the relationship is quite powerful. I want to end and have a conversation, but it's not all bad. We have people struggling, as Sheryll suggested, to do something different but I think we don't always understand the struggle. The struggle is to usher in something new. I may be wrong on this, as far as I know, there has not been one major lawsuit of white students suing because they're segregated from black students. The court talks about this as almost symmetrical. No, there's a power relationship.

john a. powell:
So you look at the desegregation lawsuits, they're always people of color suing. And what they're suing for is complicated. They're seeing for the integration of schools, not desegregation. If they're doing it right, the integration of schools. And part of that entails the integration of resources. So again, some people get it confused and they say, "Well just give us the resources and keep the people over there." The resources and the people are closely tied to each other and they least understand that. They understand the symbolism of saying, "These people not only just live in your neighborhood, go to your schools. They want to take your resources that you worked so hard to get."

john a. powell:
So the future, the future is for us to actually, consciously, deliberately swim upstream and construct a society in the world with a different way of organizing space. Douglas Massey in a really important book, Categorically Unequal, he talks about we have different mechanisms for re-instituting essentially, white supremacy. And one of the most important ones right now, if not the most important one, is space. Space is doing a lot of work. Now this system is so insidious that I'm not convinced that if we cracked the space problem there wouldn't be a new problem. That's one of the things that Sheryll is telling us, is that we've cracked Jim Crow. All right, we don't have Jim Crow anymore, the drinking fountains aren't black and white, but the prisons are, so we had mass incarceration. We cracked slavery, not entirely because there's that exception in the 13th amendment. And that exception becomes a rule and we get Jim Crow.

john a. powell:
So I'm not entirely convinced that if we crack the spatial dimension, the geographical dimension that these clever people wouldn't come up with a fourth way of reinserting. But we have to be diligent and mindful and be clear on what it is we're trying to do. We aren't just trying to end segregation. We aren't just trying to end mass incarceration. We aren't just trying to end slavery. We're trying to end the whole practice and domination of white supremacy, that's the charge which is actually a deep charge. Because it means not only organizing space differently, it means organizing identities differently. It means organizing our stories differently. It means organizing our moneys differently and that all of us are implicated, all of us are involved in that struggle.

john a. powell:
I'll tell you one quick story then I'll stop. I contacted my school system when Trump was in the White House and they were being sued, this was before the critical race theory. Think about this. Republicans are trying to ride the country back to dominance with its main agenda, you can say, three things, anti-government, race and critical race theory. That's it, that's their agenda, and that's working, and it's working.

john a. powell:
So I got a call from the school system that said, "We need help." "What's the help you need?" "We're being sued because we're teaching about the history of slavery, the history of Jim Crow, the history of colonialization, the history of genocide among Native Americans. And some of our parents are saying we're teaching to hate white people. We talk about White supremacy and white dominance, they're saying that's synonymous with saying, 'We hate white people. We hate America.' Can you help us?"

john a. powell:
And what I said is that, "So look, this is what I think you should do. And if this doesn't work call me and then I'll call Denise. What you are challenging is the notion of dominance and superiority. We're at large, not just in terms of white people. But you are challenging the notion that any people, black, white, brown, any religion, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, is superior and has the right to dominate others. And you can anchor that in some of our founding documents like the Declaration of Independence."

john a. powell:
"Make it clear that this is not abstractly against white people, this is against dominance. This is against superiority. That's the operative word, whiteness is not the operative word. Whiteness is descriptive of a larger word of dominance and superiority. And if they want to argue ... and some will feel this way but they may not argue, they know white people have a right to dominate and should dominate, that's an argument that you can win. That's a argument you should engage in." And that's what they did and the people dropped the suit.

john a. powell:
And so the hard thing that I'm trying to leave you with is that this is profoundly interrelated and it's the dominance that we actually want to challenge. And the way that dominance is expressed will continue to change. But if you look for dominance of one group, racial group over the other, that won't change unless we actually move it into something much more inclusive, much more a sense of belonging where everybody belongs. And in doing that it's important not to get lost on the people themselves, that the idea of white supremacy is not the same as white people, that in our world that we're trying to construct and I think that Sheryll is trying to construct, is one of everybody belongs, and opportunity is appropriately shared among all the people.

john a. powell:
So it's not saying one group over the other, but it's saying that everybody belongs and no one can call the government because those people are here in a white space where they don't belong. If it's a white space and everybody who's not white is suspect. And many of us have had that experience literally... When I was a student here at Berkeley, I got arrested for being a black body on a white campus, and I had to call Richard Buxbaum who's still here at Berkeley, and he had to vouch for me that I was a student, not a thug. I might have been both, but anyway... And it was just a story two days ago and then I stop Stephen turned to you. Two days ago, a white woman traveling with her biracial kid on Southwest Airlines... One of the stewards sees this white woman was a black kid and thinks something suspicious is going on and calls the police and they investigate, "What the hell are you doing with this black kid?" "I'm a mother". Hmm. Is this America?

Stephen Menendian:
Go ahead.

Sheryll Cashin:
Unfortunately, it is. I'm happy to open it up, I mean there's so many things I could say, but we would just be reinforcing each other and I would love... You think ready for us to take questions.

Stephen Menendian:
So I want to remind everyone who's online watching this through the video stream, that we're going to take your questions. So please type your questions in the chat. We're also going to take questions from audience, but I just wanted to give you one more time to respond to anything john said, or to re-emphasize any other points you wanted to make.

Sheryll Cashin:
I just want to re-emphasize that, residential caste is about power, right? It's not just about love or seeing... Living with each other. As you said, I really want to re-emphasize that point. When you set up concentrated abundance and concentrated communities of need... you all know where high opportunity spaces and where... Everybody does, right? You have a direct competition for limited public and private resources and elites regularly use their influence to bend, not only public in investment, but private investment to their will. And we live in a society and you see it over and over where it feels more and more like everything is constructed for what elites want. DC and there's so much redevelopment and all the new developments, luxury, luxury, luxury, right? I have three degrees and I walk some of these areas and I feel uncomfortable, right? So that's the point.

Stephen Menendian:
Great. Well, let's open it up for some questions. I have some questions in my back pocket if we have time. So who would like to start? We've got a roving mic and then we'll take some questions from online. Just raise your hand. Right... Right here in the middle.

Stephen Menendian:
And tell us who you are.

Allie Lutz:
Hello, my name is Allie Lutz and thank you, thank you, thank you. My question is, could you talk about congressional districting and if that plays a role here?

Sheryll Cashin:
You're talking about gerrymandering?

Allie Lutz:
Yes, exactly. Yeah, thanks.

Sheryll Cashin:
Yeah, so thank you for that question right... So the social distinctions that come naturally to people become much more efficient when you overlay geography. So it's not just, I'm uncomfortable with individuals like that... It's like you see a neighborhood and it's so much easier to say those people over there, whatever right? And then when you overlay it with politics, right? We have segregated school districts, we increasingly have boundaries that separate affluence from regular ness, right? Well, more and more, a lot of the geographic boundaries reflect that, right? And it's much easier when you're districting to pay attention to that as you're drawing lines. "Well, my people are over here. Their people are over there." Let's shove everybody into their people into that district, which will ensure that my people...I get to run only with my people, right.

Sheryll Cashin:
So... And then our politics surprise, surprise becomes much more toxic and extreme, and it's the primaries that determine the dominant narratives, right? And on the right... And you're right, in Alabama as late as 1964, when you walk into the voting booth, the official slogan of the democratic party was, "white supremacy for the right", right? It was the official organizing slogan for a hundred years in the south, right? And it's become kind of unofficial, but not so dog whistle, but explicitly said on the right, at least white identity stoking white division. It's easier to do that when people live separate or apart from others and have no intimate experience with people who walk different lives.

Stephen Menendian:
john.

john a. powell:
So just to reinforce on just one other thing that Sheryll said in terms of Gerrymandering in part is largely about power. And so... It's also bizarre and the court has said, "Yeah, gerrymandering has something to do with race, that's okay." But when they tried to create districts to really protect the black vote, O'Connor and others said, "That's not okay." She said, when it's just about race and almost all the cases that struck down drawing district boundaries would've empowered people of color, the courts have been very skeptical. You can't use race for this purpose.... But I mean, you can use race when you're constructing a white district.

john a. powell:
And so ... I just taught this and when you read it, it's like inconsistency is staggering that the court has an agenda, and the agenda is used by both parties, but more by the Republican parties. I think you know that on different level, the Senate is 50/50, only 38% of the voting population supported the Republicans and the majority of people, vast majority of people supported Democrats in the house, but the Democrats are holding on by thread. And then everybody knows that the redistricting can now use all the tools, they can, the algorithms, the computers to construct districts. And part of it's just about power, but the power that we're talking about is profoundly racialized. The Republicans for, for certainly since Trump, but if not before then has decided that it's going to ride the, the ideology of white supremacy and white resentment, as long as it possibly can.

john a. powell:
And the only thing I would add to the that is that for us not to get into that, you resent me, I'm going to resent you. And for us to actually turn that into where Republicans are, party of white people, then what about the 43% of white people who don't support the Republican party? Where do they go?

john a. powell:
And that's about the number it's about 43% of white voters don't support the Republican party. And I'm suggesting that their relationship with the rest of the country has to help forge a different possibility.

Stephen Menendian:
Great question. In the back.

Audience member:
Sheryll, you've made a very powerful framework, explanatory Framework for opportunity warning, and you refer to it...

Audience member:
Hi people online.

Audience member:
... You refer to it in terms of government action to enforce residential segregation. It's a wonderful term, it also applies to the private actors that you refer to differently and the most explanatory piece I've ever seen was within the past month in the New York Time, a lady she talks about access to good life in America is really access to high paying jobs. She goes through a factory, she takes it back to 1925 basically looking at a framework through women, a white male and a black male, okay. Women, 1925, the industrial revolution in this country starts high paying factory jobs, they're not even allowed in the factory, okay? The black men are allowed in the north, but they're allowed only as janitors, okay?

Audience member:
And the black men go to the white foreman and say, "Well, we'd like to have a chance to be on the shop floor too, more highly paid." The shop foreman says to him, says straight to his face, "Well, we can't do that because if we give you and the other black men one of these jobs, they can't go to our sons and nephews and cousins." And there you go right there, and so if you can tie this in to the opportunity hoarding that occurs through private actors, in terms of jobs, education, everything you have explained the whole kit and caboodle as they say.

Sheryll Cashin:
Well, I couldn't do it all in 20 minutes, but I'll say high poverty neighborhoods, particularly high poverty neighborhoods of color, invariably are like 180 degrees away from the job rich centers, right? And a lot of those people are transportation dependent, it could take 90 minutes even to get there, right? So they're cut off from economic opportunity... They are as cut off as the previous system of race based castes, where they said, "These jobs are for us", right? So today geography kind of plays that role, that it played in the past of cutting people out of economic opportunity... And I'm going to stop there so other people can get questions in.

Stephen Menendian:
Any questions over here? Then we'll take one online.

Leah Murray:
Thank you, my name is Leah Murray, and this is my husband Ramon Quintana, and we actually do homelessness work with the unhoused in the City of Richmond and so this is really near and dear to my heart. I'm wondering if you can relate the residential caste system with homelessness and race. And my other question is how do you do this work without your stomach continually turning over?

Sheryll Cashin:
Okay so, I'm not an expert on homelessness, but just from reading the paper, the impression I get is that in California, many, if not most of the homeless people, are people of color, a lot of them are mental patients, right? And that's not an accident, right? We don't invest... First of all, as I said before, the system of residential caste we have is such that in many major cities, it is illegal to build anything other than a large detached home on 75% of the land, right? So the laws are designed for only a slither of the population, only a person who can afford that lifestyle and everybody else be damned, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
So there's that, there's also, this anti-black fear is what animates almost all of the policies that shape what gets built, right? If we try to repeal exclusionary zoning or say, okay, we're going to have a lot more housing, a lot more affordable housing, different types of housing, quadplexes right? Apartments, micro housings. The vested interests are people who live in those areas... The 75% of the land, which is zoned just for them is like, hell no, right? And again... Trump is nothing if not transparent, I at least appreciate that he's honest, vulgarly transparent. He's running in 2020 and says, "You can thank me for protecting your suburban white dream", right? So it's all bound up, we devalue and fear black people, but frankly, the story is more about overvaluing the interest and demands of elites.

Sheryll Cashin:
But the 100 years of policy that I glossed over, is mainly about shaping the desires and catering to the desires of whites, even middle income whites. Like here, you get your majority white suburban dream that others are cut out of... We're going to construct this for you and, surprise, surprise people, resist anything else, right? And so homelessness is an outgrowth of all of that. I hope that's responsive.

Stephen Menendian:
john, you want to add anything to that?

Sheryll Cashin:
These are complicated problems or issues and we can't do them just in such - in a short period of time. Here in California, and Stephen knows this, I think better than most, he does a lot of work on housing. We're about 3 million units short of housing, 3 million units. 3 million units, that's the state. We're not building housing, and then when we do build it, we build it in the wrong place, we don't build it close to transportation.

Sheryll Cashin:
So why don't we build housing? And some of the things that Sheryll talked about. So, the problem in some ways is not that hard. Now it's complicated because frankly, I think we are divided as well. So housing advocates... Some of them think the way you actually get rid of... Because if you look at homelessness, it's actually more than one thing, and you know this as a homeless advocate, it used to be more in line with what you all just said recently in Seattle and The Bay area, more and more middle class people without mental problems are becoming homeless and unhoused, and under housed living in our RV's. So start off, small problem, sex expanding further and further. The rate in which we are trying to change is being outstrip by the problem, the problem's going faster.

john a. powell:
We're here in Berkeley, it's hard to find a house in Berkeley, any house in Berkeley, including a tear down under a million dollars. That's going to... We try to hire faculty here they say... Denise, they say, we have this little housing program, they say, "Great you're going to help you with $50,000, a hundred thousand dollars, great, I'm coming from Cleveland." And then they say, but the house, modest house that you want is going to cost $1.5 million and you're getting... Your salary, won't support that.

john a. powell:
So the problem is huge, but it's a very powerful, strong market. The realtor lobbyist is one of the strongest lobbyists in the country. The problem from a technical perspective, it's easy to solve, the problem from a political perspective is impossible to solve. So we're dealing with both of those things at the same time, and the housing issue is largely migrated into probably just bricks and mortar to also a credit problem. Look, the subprime lending that was all about global credit chasing and they dictating the housing market, we haven't kept up with that, but it's solvable at least in terms of policy technically, but the politics of it is a hot mess, Stephen.

Stephen Menendian:
Well, I want to bridge that last question with one of the questions we got online, but also note, there was a phenomenal segment John Oliver did this week on homelessness, and one of the things that comes out so vividly in your book, Sheryll, is that every single time a community is debating an affordable housing development, a policy, a plan that public opposition is so intense, almost ubiquitous - historical contemporary in Marin. There's the famous development that George Lucas was supporting in San Francisco, the homelessness... I forget what they were called, coordination centers, but what's almost always the case in every single one of instances is that there's a racial coding to it, about crime, about drugs, all these sorts of things just layered into it. So one of the things that you've also written about separately, Sheryll in Place, not Race, very skeptically of, and somewhat here too as well, very skeptically, a place based strategies.

Stephen Menendian:
So you lift up the... Pretty much the success that mobility strategies have had, much more skeptical of sort of targeted and, and really robust, directed investments in places that are low opportunity. But as you also recognize, we have to do both. So one of the questions online is a really good question, and I think you touch on it in a couple places in your book. Can you discuss how to bring public investments to impoverished neighborhoods without causing displacement and gentrification? Are there any models you can highlight? And not only that, how do you make sure that these developments benefit locals?

Sheryll Cashin:
I always try to take on the hardest questions, but that's what engineers do, right? So you see I've evolved a bit, right? So in my chapter Abolition and Repair, I prioritize investing in historically defunded black neighborhoods, right? And I say, it is a moral matter - the state is obligated to repair what it still breaks, right? And so I argue that neighborhoods that have been traumatized... The history is not long ago, you can say they should be first in line for new infrastructure dollars, right? Descendants, any kid in a apartheid schools, right? They should get more, extra, right? The bus routes from the poor neighborhoods should be free, community college, if you can't do it for everybody, make it free for people trapped in the hood, right? I could go on, right?

Sheryll Cashin:
Universal basic income, which is.... Mike what's his name? The mayor from Stockton who... right. I could go on now when it comes to housing... Yeah, the minute you solve violence, problems, in high poverty neighborhoods, or you start to greenline those neighborhoods and give them more or nicer... Yeah, people are going to go there because it's cheaper and now it's safe. So I'm really into... Talk about collective ownership strategies, I feature some places that are doing this, it's going on in a number of places where you need to transfer assets, to trusted community institutions that can own rental properties and make sure that they remain in perpetuity available and affordable to low income people and also institutions that are about the business of retaining culture, right? As you go forward, right? But the fear gentrification is not an argument for not giving historically defunded neighborhoods, their fair share of resources.

john a. powell:
Let me just add two things to that, Stephen, one, there are a number of examples ... of neighborhoods being invested in, but the people then get pushed out. So it's not just the neighborhoods, we want to make sure that the people there actually benefit from the investments. For years, there's an area in Portland where they tried to invest in neighborhoods and they finally did and then it's beautiful, a friend of mine lives there now. It was the Latino neighborhood, she's now thinking about leaving, because she's the lone Latino still living there and they used to call they put in bike lanes and the people in the neighborhood calling white lanes. So it's not just investing in space you have to actually think about people. The focus has to be on people, not place, not mobility, but people, and the politics of that is fierce because the people who are living in those hoarded neighborhoods play the political game very well.

john a. powell:
So that's why I say it's not a hard technical problem. It's a hard political problem. And then there's another wrinkle that actually adds to this as well, private investment. So if you are getting ready to open up a grocery store on its own, which you are opening up in an area that's high income or low income? There's a pull for high income, right? Because people have more disposable income. It becomes a perpetuating cycle, so you have to do something to disrupt that. The private investment is likely to chase the same kind of neighborhoods where investment is already hoarded. You have all these multiple layers that you have to sort of at least have a handle in on at the same time. Must focusing on one probably won't work.

Stephen Menendian:
We have time to get a couple more questions in, and then I'm going to ask a question on solutions to wrap us up. We had a bunch more online too. One just note though, is there's a big fight in Oakland right now around the Oakland A's athletic stadium, much like these other. Oakland has lost the NBA team, the NFL team, and now the A's have been threatening to leave if they don't get their waterfront development. Part of the fight is around the percentage of affordable housing that should be part of the development. But part of it also is all these other issues of billionaires, hat in hand, asking for subsidies.

Stephen Menendian:
On the social housing question, one of the researchers in the room, Eli Moore at the institute sent me a chart last week that reminded me... I'd forgotten about this... that the Housing Choice Voucher Program has a home ownership subprogram within it. It's not just for rentals but it's essentially... The number of units in the Bay Area that that program has increased is basically zero in 20 years. It's the same flat. So there's great need, and these programs, if they could be scaled up could be immensely helpful. All right. I saw a few more questions. Let's start over here, Marc. Question right over here.

Brandi Summers:
Hello. Thank you for this conversation. My name's Brandi Summers, and I teach in the geography department. It's interesting to talk about geography with a law professor. So I'm really interested, not only in the conversation that's happened this afternoon because I have a lot of thoughts about them, especially around gentrification and housing, but in particular, in thinking, Sheryll, about how you're saying geography is crucial now to think about anti-blackness in meaningful ways. Isn't it always been? Hasn't geography always been and really important to creating essentially anti-blackness. If we're thinking about the plantation, if we're thinking about the location of plantations, but then also zipping through Jim Crow, urban renewal, which again, I imagine you've traced. But just geography really contributing to the conditions under which we understand how black people exist and ways that racialization changes based on space or based on what's considered urban versus suburban, rural, et cetera. So I'd love to hear more about how I guess the spatial focus, especially in thinking about policy, might differ from this longer term understanding of how geography is integral to anti-black racism here.

Sheryll Cashin:
So I recognize you from Twitter. Nice to see you in person. Thank you for coming. It's just so funny. You see these people, and you tweet with them and then there they are. They actually are real. So thank you for that question. So here's the thing. Yes, absolutely. There's a persistent story for hundreds of years about geography and blackness. But what's distinctive is beginning in the tens and twenties, what gets constructed outside the South, right? As black people move from one system of social containment. You see this in the man from Princeton who-

Stephen Menendian:
Sharkey?

john a. powell:
Doug Massey?

Sheryll Cashin:
Doug Massey. You see this in Doug Massey's work. Right, right. Sorry. I'm getting old. In the South there wasn't that much dissimilarity. Blacks and whites lived actually in close proximity, but Jim Crow was a mechanism of social suppression, right. Residence becomes the mechanism of social containment elsewhere. So that's what's distinctive. It's interesting. If you look at Ta-Nehisi Coates' seminal piece on reparations, he spends more time on housing in the 20th century than he actually does on slavery. So as I said before, the dominant experience for black Americans in their access or lack thereof to opportunity has been one of residential segregation, right? Even so-called high income black people tend to live in more modest opportunity places than white people who make much less than them. So that's what's distinct about it. It becomes really, really marked in the 20th century. And it is the main mechanism, I believe, of defining who gets opportunity and who doesn't today.

john a. powell:
Can I just add something?

Sheryll Cashin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

john a. powell:
So that's exactly right. And the caveat, think about it. Before transportation, you had to live close to where you work. So blacks in the South had to actually live... I don't know if you're from the South, but if you go to South, you see plantations and blacks always lived on the plantation. They lived within walking distance to work. With cars, you now can have people live a long way and with public transportation, as bad as it is, it created a new mechanism. So it is quite different. The physical space is much greater today than it was back then. The social space back then did the work. So blacks and whites lived next to each other, but the social line was very clear. So you had the white drinking fountain and the black drinking fountain right next to each other. Now you have the white drinking fountain over here and the black drinking fountain 10 miles away.

Stephen Menendian:
Well, we got a lot of questions online. Unfortunately we're not going to have time to get through all of them, and you should have type them in faster and earlier. But let's at least get to this one. And maybe one more question from the audience if we have time. Then I'll wrap up with one question on solutions. So, john, one of your mentors was Derrick Bell, who I think is safe to say was one of the fathers, so to speak, of critical race theory. Critical race theory obviously has been hijacked by the right wing, has become a boogeyman, has become a frame for scaring people. The question here is what can we say in two minutes at a school board meeting to effectively present... I didn't say the question was was easy. To effectively present a different conversation than the CRT message being pushed by conservative folks. Anne Randell.

john a. powell:
Well, two things. I think one we have to get out of binaries. It's not either/or. We have to be willing to embrace complexity, which a two minute answer does not allow us to do. We have to make clear that in talking about American history, like any history, we have good things and bad things. We only learn from dealing with it all. We don't want to paint it that it's all good. That's what they say is that, "We can't talk about slavery. That makes us feel bad." Think about how it make the slaves feel.

john a. powell:
So it's like, so deal with it. And there is a little bit of a thing that happens. So the conservatives paint this picture, it's the greatest country that ever live. Everything's wonderful. Frankly, progressives are just the opposite. It's nothing good about this country. Both of those seem to be somewhat problematic and somewhat narrow. It's a complicated process. But more importantly, we actually trying to construct a future where we all belong. We can only do that by looking at how we're situated and how we got there. It's not a question of necessarily guilt, but it is a question of responsibility. So that would my two minute answer. Sheryll.

Sheryll Cashin:
Well, I say this to my students. I actually participated in a debate for the Federalist Society with a guy who is suing school districts on the behalf of white plaintiffs. Right? What I said was, first of all, CRT's not being taught in schools. Second of all, there are two main ideas behind CRT, where it is taught in law schools and other places. One is that racism is embedded in law, and that's true. Then I just listed, it took me like 30 seconds to list a lot of policies where it's obvious. Right? Then second main premise of CRT is that the civil rights revolution, which was mainly an anti-discrimination revolution of giving people individual rights to sue has not been effective in undermining systemic racism. That's true too.

Sheryll Cashin:
Then I say, I teach my sons, I teach my law students that the American story is one of this dance between our beautiful self-evident truths and fighting the ideology that sets slavery in motion. Right? And it's a beautiful story. There are heroes and there are villains and there are complicated people. Thomas Jefferson embodies the complication. Right? But I hold up my heroes. A lot of them are white. Radical Republicans, right? Thaddeus Stevens. Right? There are these heroes of all colors, and the thing that gives me the most hope about this country is that the coalition of multiracial allies who are fighting to make our self-evident truth actually true for people in their daily lives is growing. Right? I don't demonize white people. They're a big part of the coalition. Right? So I just, that's what I say. I tell that story, right? I like this notion of like, do you want the white supremacist to win? You want your kid to believe in white supremacy? I don't know. I might try some of that turning. That was clever.

Stephen Menendian:
Well, we're just about out of time. I can't let us go without asking about solutions. But before I do that, because I know we'll close immediately after that. Sheryll will be signing copies of her book. We have a book seller in the back. So if there are questions that you didn't get a chance to get answered, please approach her or any of us afterwards and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to do that.

john a. powell:
Stephen, can I make one minor...

Stephen Menendian:
Sure.

john a. powell:
Two people here have been holding up the hands since the very beginning. So if we can get to both of their questions...

Stephen Menendian:
Okay, let's do that popcorn style. Then I'll ask the solution question.

Stephen Menendian:
Hold your answers though, until we get both questions. Go ahead.

Jabari Mahiri:
My name is Jabari Mahiri. I'm a professor here. I'm tenured, and I say that because it's a part of the question that I want to ask. The question that I want to ask has to do with, I think we've touched on this issue, but can we really destroy white supremacy without serious disruption of capitalism? I say that to say, as a tenured professor, I could argue one of the things we want to do is get more people in the professoriate and more people tenured. But tenure itself is a part of the feudal system that manifests the inequities and how resources are distributed in the university as a reflection of how it's distributed inequitably in a society. So capitalism for me is a word that has not come up today, and I just want the panelists to talk about how that might actually precede issues of inequity and space.

Stephen Menendian:
And the other question, please.

Marla:
Oh, me?

Stephen Menendian:
Yeah. Can you grab the mic?

Marla:
Oh. Thank you. My name is Marla. I worked in Baltimore for many years doing education advocacy. So housing and education, specifically school funding formulas are just inextricably linked together. So what we advocated for in Baltimore for many years is a multiplier for students that are living in concentrated poverty because you go to some schools in Baltimore and it's 80, 90% of students living in poverty. We have a per pupil funding system that is throughout. I just wanted to ask a question of how do we have this conversation at schools where folks who are responsible for funding schools understand where students are in this process?

Sheryll Cashin:
If I could take that one up really quickly. I don't know if you've been following the care one funding. So that message seems to have gotten through, right? The legislature has passed this $4 billion plan and as I understand it, the legislation includes a provision that high poverty places should get more. It's probably not going to be enough, but at least the politics in Maryland, and I think they had to override Hogan's veto in order to do that. Right?

Sheryll Cashin:
Right, right, right. Thank you. Right. It's been awhile since I finished it. Okay. So that's what's exciting, right? In so-called blue states or so-called progressive cities, progressive states, I do think there is a critical mass of white people who wants to be part of the coalition and is down with yes, more racial equity. Yes, less racial oppression. We can argue about the details, but we're getting better and there's more possibility for achieving that.

Sheryll Cashin:
I can't briefly speak to your question. It's just way too complicated for me to speak briefly to it. But what I would say is in this book, I had to fight my battles. I picked my battle and my goal in this book was to tell the story of persistent anti-black oppression manifesting in residential castes and how we're all trapped in it. That's what I set out to do in this book. That may be a different book.

john a. powell:
So I definitely, obviously think capitalism is a problem, but I don't think capitalism is a thing. Capitalism, there are many different expressions of capitalism. We only have to look at our neighbors north of us. Their school system is funded completely different than ours at a national level. Their friends, like Tony Iton over at California Endowment. He said, when he came here, he's Canadian, but well, anyway, he's black. Let me just say that. He said when he came to Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins because he's a doctor, he said he asked, "When was the war here?" He hadn't seen anything like that. I'm not saying Canada is perfect, but it is capitalist. So I think we should look at these systems hard, but I don't want to load it up so heavy that until we resolve all the problems, we can't resolve some of the problems. So we can do better, and eventually we will bump up into different expressions of capitalism.

john a. powell:
But again, it's all around the world countries are on that spectrum of capitalism. I mean, England is the closest to us in many ways. And you look at the number of people who are killed by the police in England. It's almost nothing compared to the United States, and it's still a capitalist country. So it's not capitalism doesn't explain everything, but it is important.

Stephen Menendian:
So we're really out of time. I want to ask this last question of you, and then we'll leave. I think we got to six questions in the audience, two online, and we have a stack more, and I'm sure a lot of you have questions we didn't get to. But one of the things that's apparent in books like yours, Sheryll, is that they're long on the problem and short on solution. I think you have a wonderful chapter called abolition repair. Although you're not super explicit about it, I counted at least 22 implied policy or process recommendations that you think could help really begin to turn the corner on systemic racism in this country. I'm wondering if both of you, starting with you, Sheryll, could just maybe list off your top two or three recommendations of things that would really put us on the path to remedy and solution, or repair as you put it.

Sheryll Cashin:
Okay. So the main goal from the outset, the overarching principles, right? You want to disrupt the three anti-black processes. So boundary maintenance. My number one policy goal is mandatory inclusionary zoning. Right? Instead of exclusionary zoning. I hold up some example. Minneapolis repealed its single family zoning ordinance. California only opened up single family neighborhoods to duplexes. Right? So mandatory inclusionary zoning. Every neighborhood should have its fair share in new development of some low income units. Okay?

Sheryll Cashin:
Opportunity hoarding. My number one proposal is racial equity analysis or neighborhood analysis, right? Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Seattle have laws which require a neighborhood analysis where you're actually looking at where the dollars have been going, and you try to achieve more racial equity in allocating resources going forward. Right? That is what Biden's racial equity analysis is about. So that's that.

Sheryll Cashin:
Then stereotype driven surveillance. I'm not an expert on policing, but my number one policy proposal is the one created by this man back in the corner-

Stephen Menendian:
The fellowship.

Sheryll Cashin:
The Office of Neighborhood Safety and Peacemaker Fellowships. If you want to learn about it, go to advancepeace.org, right? How many cities are y'all up in now?

Speaker 6:
We're in 14, but we'll be operating in about 20...

Sheryll Cashin:
Okay.

Stephen Menendian:
It's amazing.

Sheryll Cashin:
So there you are.

Stephen Menendian:
Thank you. john, you want to add anything?

john a. powell:
Again, I would support all of those and maybe it with the two caveats or two additions. One would be, I think we have to be, we actually put something called target universalism. So one of the things that the law has actually pushed us is to not name race. When we do, it's like they go crazy. Especially if you're naming in favor of people of color. When you're doing it in favor of whites, they're more quiet. I think so, we actually have to be able to name the populations we are trying to serve. I don't think that just means black people, but I think it should be weighted in terms of black people.

john a. powell:
So I believe for example, if we just do affordable housing, they'll find a way to make sure that black people are left out. So I think we have to really be specific. So part of that is what I'd call a belonging or racial audit for different groups, how money's spent. Outcomes, not inputs, so not who's getting money, but how it's being used, how it's changing. With clear goals. Closing what people call racial wealth gap. But anyway, I think having the numbers, the data to show how different groups are situated in terms of opportunity and where we try to get to would be something that I would support.

Stephen Menendian:
Great. We'll stop there. Thank you so much, and thank you all.