In the U.S., Cashin notes, there is an underlying cultural assumption that people live where they deserve to, “that affluent space is earned and hood living is the deserved consequence of individual behavior.” Emblematic of this thinking, Cashin shrewdly observes, is the way the term ghetto has morphed from a noun to an adjective. Whereas ghetto once connoted an enforced separation of a people, whether Jews in sixteenth-century Venice or Black people in modern America, today it is also “a pejorative” used to describe “dress, speech and social codes” that are rejected by middle-class Americans.
Cashin brings to bear considerable evidence to show that poor neighborhoods are not the natural result of sorting by merit; to the contrary, both Black and white spaces in America have been socially engineered by government. Consider Baltimore, which is today highly segregated by race and class. It was not always thus, Cashin writes. Working-class white and Black people were reasonably integrated in the late nineteenth century. When George W.F. McMechen, a Black Yale Law graduate, moved into a white upper-middle-class neighborhood in the early twentieth century, however, white families reacted with violence and legislation. “Whites threw stones and bricks into the McMechens’ new home,” Cashin writes, and Baltimore’s mayor, J. Barry Mahool, championed the nation’s first racial zoning legislation, which banned Black people from moving into white neighborhoods.
Mahool did not mince words. “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods and to protect property values among the White majority,” he declared. The New York Times article about the ordinance, Cashin notes, “featured an image of the handsome, dapper, and presumably disease-free McMechen.”
Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial zoning as a violation of the Constitution in 1917, segregationists in Baltimore and elsewhere employed a slew of additional tactics: racially restrictive covenants (which were not struck down until 1948), redlining (which was not made illegal until 1968), and economically exclusionary zoning (which exists to this day). Whites also fought efforts to place public housing in middle-class neighborhoods; in fact, in 1994, the otherwise liberal Maryland U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski killed a federal program that provided the opportunity for low-income families, many of them Black, to live in upper-middle-class areas in the Baltimore region and elsewhere.
The broad outlines of this story of racial exclusion will be familiar to many readers through the superb work of authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Rothstein. But Cashin is also alert to the rising significance of economic discrimination and segregation that disproportionately hurt Black people.