Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Sheryll Cashin 20220423

well, that's a loaded question peter. wonderful to be with you part of it is that i was born and raised in huntsville, alabama and surrounded by engineers who came to huntsville to in the race to put the man on the moon. so engineering was a very common degree that people pursued i needed money for college. my activist parents were broke and vanderbilt offered me a merit scholarship on forever grateful. i loved science and math and i use the logic of engineering in my writing you could particularly i think see it in my most recent book where i'm a self-hot-taught historian, but i bring a systems analysis. to the structures that create racial inequality. so there's a connection there. it's helps me to think critically. well that path began in huntsville, alabama. it went through vanderbilt university and then to oxford university masters in english law jd from harvard. and then a clerkship with supreme court justice thurgood marshall the clinton white house and finally to authorship and georgetown university cheryl cashion. you were only the second african-american to clerk for justice marshall. is that correct? no, i was the only second black woman to clerk for justice marshall. he had had a number of black male clerks, but i was his second black female clerk after his goddaughter karen hasty williams. what did that experience mean to you? oh until i got married and had children. it was the best year of my life bar none. thurgood marshall was an icon obviously, but he was also just a wonderful human being he was the best storyteller he would share the most you would be on the edge of your seat listening to him tell stories from barely getting out of sleepy southern towns within with his life evading an attempted lynching to meeting with prince hanging out with prince philip when they were drafting the canyon constitution when he was doing that to hanging out with langston hughes his fraternity brother and my grandfather's fraternity brother alpha phi alpha at lincoln university. so it was just delightful. i i devoted time to my work, but i also whenever i had the time to just sit with him and talk to him i took it and it was fabulous. your second book. the agitator's daughter came out in 2008 to family history. who's the agitator? and who's the daughter? the agitator is my father dr. john logan cash and junior. i'm obviously the daughter and that memoir was my effort in my mid 40s to come to terms with my childhood and understanding why it is that a two-time valedictorian and a dentist in huntsville, alabama would pour hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into a political party for the benefit of dirt poor black sharecroppers who were down in the black belt the middle western part of the state in ways that caused a lot of financial turmoil for our family because of the attacks that came to him and so i go off and search of understanding my emotional inheritance this idea of agitation for people who have a lot less than you, but i also go off in search of family lore trying to understand this legacy and my father's obsession with black political participation and and achieve reaching reconstruction in the state. so he was he ran for governor against george wallace. he sure did talk about that. yeah at the top of a ticket of a party that he and others created the national democratic party of alabama. my father had no illusions about winning that race, but his point was to create a party where newly registered black voters coming off the voting rights act of 1965 had a place to go with their votes in as late as 1966 the official slogan of the alabama democratic party was white supremacy for the right and you could see that when you entered the voting booth. it was a banner above and below the party emblem the rooster so they founded a different party to enable particularly black people in the black belt of alabama not us to vote but to run for office themselves, and he headed that ticket trying to inspire people to do that and he would proudly say in that election particularly the election of 68 they in counties that used to be dominated by virulent violence backed white supremacy. they got people elected to county sheriff probate judge school board reconstruction return to those counties because of ndpa. cheryl cashion in your latest book white space black hood you identify as a descendant of both slaves and slaveholders? well, that's the truth. i established that in agitator's daughter where i go back sixth generations of with cash and i descend from a guy named jane john cashion. who was a enslaver in augusta, but also, a very complicated man had an apparently benevolent relationship with a mixed-race woman and father a gaggle of children named cashion, including my great-grandfather. so i descend from that and then my mother's side of the family. i also did descend from enslaved people. and your great-great-grandmother was lucinda boudre lucinda boudre who you write about. right. she is the mick. thank you for naming her she is the mixed race woman who had this relationship with john cashion in augusta. we could not establish for certain whether she was enslaved or free but i find her in philadelphia in 1860 the head of a household with a you know, something like six children named cashion by then john cashion her common law husband i think was deceased. and somehow this very brave seamstress mixed race woman was able to raise these children mary off her oldest daughter into a very established black family in the city and my grandfather one of her children two of her children were afforded a classical. education at the institute for colored youth and i think that was the beginning of my grandfather's. not just education but radicalization. he there were a lot of leading lights of abolitionism and and civil rights. involved in that school and he goes from there after back south and within years of leaving that institute has gotten himself elected to the alabama legislature during reconstruction. cheryl cashin is currently the author of five books beginning in 2005 the failures of integration. how race and class are undermining the american dream. the agitator's daughter came out in '08 to memoir of four generations of one extraordinary african-american family. place not race a new vision of opportunity in america 2014 loving iterational intimacy in america and the threat to white supremacy came out in 2017 her most recent book white space black hood opportunity hoarding in the age. of inequality is there a thread? that connects these books. absolutely. that all of them are wrestling with the epic story of the american experiment and how and whether we are going to have a republic where racial minorities in addition to white people. have a union and have politics which enables everyone to be a citizen with equal access to opportunity and we've been in this dance and in the loving book. i start from 1607 for in the for colonial, virginia i go from 1607 to the president and then my most recent book white space black hood i go from the 1890s to the present, but we've been in this dance the beginning between our values of beautiful values of universal human equality dignity and a competing ideology. unfortunately of white supremacy and one of the themes of the book and thank you so much again for having me in this having me be here and having to reflect on this body of work. i think is that i say we've had these structures of white supremacy slavery jim crow the iconic racial segregation that created the black ghetto but we're all trapped in it right? we're my theme is that all of us of all colors are trapped in. that structures created by supremacy by supremacists and cynics and we have to figure out how to break free to be a unified country. well in your book place not race you write quote. i prefer place rather than race as the focus of affirmative action for the pragmatic reason that it will foster more social cohesion and a better politics. what do you mean by that? well, i believe in affirmative action. i believe that all institutions should endeavor to be racially and economically diverse and that and they're hiring practices in their you know, the looking for candidates. they should endeavor to do that, but when it comes to access to selective higher education it just so happens that a lot of people endure structural disadvantage ie separate and unequal under resource schools and a lot of the practices in higher education tended to reify advantage, right? and so while i think that as a matter of constitutional law it is legal and constitutional for institutions to consider race as a plus factor. i argued that. as a matter of policy design universities ought to consider pursuing affirmative action in a way that expanded opportunity and reduce social tension, right and at the time it seems quaint now i wrote that book in 1940 and slip, i'm tired 2014. you know, this is before trump became president, right, but there was a lot of backlash to obama a lot of nasty politics going on at that time, and i said particularly to progressives i said if we don't figure this problem out of bringing cohesion a cohesive politics where the vast majority citizens believe in the enterprise of democracy believe in the enterprise of government and see it as responsive to them in their needs. we're going to get an even worse place and when i was sort of rereading what i said, you know obama was still president. we had not yet had a resurgence of alt-right white nationalism. i feel like you know, it was a very intellectually brave book that was against my own children's interest. but i feel somewhat. it sadly vindicated by what i said about, you know, we were going to be entering a very bad place in politics and it's gotten worse since then. so well, you are as i want to. have another quote from place not race and this ties into what's happening at the university of michigan harvard and some of the other schools quote the achievers in low opportunity places that rise despite the undertow deserve special consideration from selective schools. colleges should reform their admissions processes in a way that enables them to discern these critical non-cognitive skills and count them as merit. this is something that's coming up before the supreme court, correct? right and what i said in that book is that it was time to take the lessons of decades of affirmative action and apply it to the entire admissions process for everyone right? i said that we should scrub the admissions process of any practices that don't screen for what social science actually says is merit and for example, i called for making sat scores standardized test scores optional because what they most predict is the wealth. and socioeconomic background of the parents of the applicant. they're not even the sixth or seventh strongest predictor of actual performance in college. the most strong predictor is cumulative high school gpa and grit stick to itiness the willingness to put aside recreation to do the work which can be predict can be screened for in a holistic application. right? so i also called for scrapping legacy preferences, right and i you know, i was a very i think almost all advocacy is somewhat biographical, right? you know, i was the covalictorian of a pretty good, but not stratospheric public high school sr. butler high school in huntsville, alabama, and i was very aware that there's a valedictorian in every high school. there's a striver in every high school, but what we what we begun to call merit was really a method of exclusion, right? so, you know, and i i don't take credit for it, but i am happy to see that the pandemic has accelerated some of these innovations and that many schools now are making standardized tests optional, but let me be clear. i want to make this absolutely clear. i teach constitutional law. i am not saying and i have never said that the constitution requires. universities to to never consider race to be race neutral or to be colorblind. there's nothing in the constitution that requires that and indeed if you look at the framers of the 14th amendment who were some of my heroes radical republicans who were trying to reconstruct? the former confederate south um the idea that they would require equal protection to eliminate any consideration of histories of racial exclusion, i think is antithetical to their original intent where they were trying to overrule dred scott and affirmatively put a surround or give black people formally enslaved people all of the full rights of citizenship and access, so i want to be clear about the difference between the pending supreme court case and what i argued as a matter of policy design why don't we know more about the progress that huntsville alabama made prior to the very well publicized civil rights movement in alabama and some of the struggles. well, i think the images of birmingham. and water hoses and attack dogs being turned on the children of birmingham. and george wallace and his you know, iconic standing in the schoolhouse store and his rhetoric segregation today segregation mark. those are the things. that got the most attention. most people don't know what they can read. the agitator's daughter that huntsville, alabama desegregated its public accommodations two full years before the civil rights. act was passed a year before. the water hoses were turned on the children of birmingham in you know, i bloodless transition in part and i i have a chapter about this. my my dad and mom and other civil rights leaders in huntsville came up with. amazing strategy, right they they knew that what the city fathers and they were fathers in huntsville most cared about was huntsville's image as it was trying to help get man on the moon. and they cared about that and so they they would stage incredible protests. like my mother taking me as a four month old baby to a lunch counter to get herself arrested along with an eight-month pregnant woman doctor sonny hereford's wife. martha hereford or having protests at the us the new york stock exchange saying don't investment for in huntsville is bad for business the city leaders decided, you know, we can't have this this doesn't look good and they negotiated. a desegregation. well, that was a quiet story. that didn't get told because you know other things violent things were happening in alabama that got more attention. before we leave the supreme court you were recently quoted in the washington post talking about the supreme court nomination. that's pending by president biden quote. my guess. is that the dave biden nominates a black woman. there will be many black girls across the nation who will see themselves for the first time as future lawyers and judges and that will contribute to diversifying the profession. i want to ask you was it a mistake for president biden to narrow his search prior to conducting the search. why did i know you were going to ask me this question. it's too easy. okay first can i just tell our watchers that you're in one room in the studio? and i'm in another and that i'm looking at a just a camera. i can't see you. so i want to apologize to the audience in advance if i sometimes look off. it's it's a strange experience. just looking at a camera. you know, i'm just letting them know. but anyway. so no, it wasn't a mistake. it wasn't a mistake. i i defend what he did and what he's promised to do in part. it makes transparent what has been going on with the court for decades, right? you know, ronald reagan famously nominated sandra day o'connor said he wanted to nominate a woman and he nominated her was it the case prior to that moment that the only qualified people to serve on the us court the us supreme court were men. no, what and and biden. let's be clear about when he first made this pledge. he made this pledge. he had lost in the primary twice. he was going to south carolina. he wanted to energize frankly african-american voters and it worked it did it was part of his pledge, you know and and african and in some ways, it's just an acknowledgment that there is a group of people who have been excluded from serving systemically on the us courts who are his most loyal supporters and who re-energized politics in the south to help him particularly win in georgia and other presidents have done similar things to energize their base. they make pledges to nominate people who are pro-life the supreme court people may not like hearing this, but it's just true it is a political institution in that sense and the president is allowed to nominate who he wants right? it's not the same as a written policy for college admissions. all right, and then he's affirmative action as a general matter. it's designed it at its best to force institutions to diversify themselves in order to be more legitimate in the eyes of the people and the only thing the supreme court has for its legitimacy is that we the people look at it and supported as legitimate and therefore will comply with its laws. well, you know having african-american woman on the court will certainly expand its legitimacy in the eyes of a lot of people particularly african americans who are often on receiving end of opinions by that court that they heartily disagree with so it's a long-winded way of saying i defend what he's done. it's uncomfortable i suppose but to have him say it out loud that i want to nominate a black woman some people wish he had just waited and nominated a black woman, but at least he's being transparent about a history of exclusion on the court. it's long overdue. he said and i think he's right. well, good afternoon and welcome to book tvs in depth program where we spend two hours with one author and his or her body of work this month. it's author law professor. cheryl cashin. we've gone through some of her books some of her thoughts and we also want to encourage your participation. here's how you can do so you can dial in on the phone 202 is the area code 748-8200 for those of you in the east and central time zones, two, zero two seven four eight eight two zero one if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones, and if you want to send a text message to professor kashian, you can do it this way. again. this is for text messages only please include your first name in your city if you would 202-748-8903 now you can also make comments on facebook and twitter. at book tv is our handle for those social media accounts. we'll begin taking those calls in just a few minutes. cheryl cashin, i'm going to spend a few minutes with your book loving which came out in 2017. july 11th 1958 2 am central point, virginia what happened? a couple of police officers burst into richard and mildred lovings home. they were newlyweds they were in bed. they had their marriage license on the wall above them and they were and mildred was pregnant and they took them away arrested them charged them with as felons. for the simple act of being in love and getting married. and that was the beginning of a nine-year struggle on the part of that couple. to just live in virginia as a happily married couple and what we know about richard and mildred is that they were not. trying to make a point. by getting married, is that correct? no, um to his credit. a richard loving he was participating that they were in central point virginia, which was a small hamlet mainly of farmers that had had a habit of mixing what my father jokingly used to call nighttime integration. had a habit of mixing going back from colonial times. there was a fairly widespread common practice in that community of white men having a -- woman on the side. and richard loving was unique in that he wanted to marry the woman that he loved the brown woman that he loved and he wasn't making political points. he just loved her and and wanted like other like everybody else to have the ability to marry her and and live and be left alone. 1967 supreme court decision unanimous. what did it say? so that was the war in court. it was an opinion written by. chief justice warren the author of the much more famous. i think brownby board decision. he said that this law the racial integrity act. of 1924 which made it a felony for a white person to marry or have sex with a non-white person and white was defined. you were only white if you had 100% white blood which is probably impossible for most people and what the court said was. this 300-year history on the part of virginia of separating people this way regulating them banning them from interracial marriage and sex was a policy designed to promote white supremacy, and he said it with capital letters. it was the first time in the history of the court in which it used those words. he used used them twice white supremacy. to name the ideology behind the law and he said, you know under the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the constitution united states. this is unconstitutional and we cannot have it and so at that point there were 16 states who still had laws like this at one point there were 41. and so that was the beginning of the that was the formal dismantling of one plank in jim crow the last plank in jim crow and since then in 1967 when it was decided the social barriers to interracial mixing. have come down quite a bit. what was life like for mildred and richard from 1958 to 1967? it was fairly harrowing. they and i want to tell you that i just started hearing my self echo and my ear it hadn't been happening before and it's it's quite distracting. i just want to let you know that i'll get that fixed. okay? thank you. they fixed so. they agreed to be exiled rather than jailed because they had very young children. so and this was not a it the judge who oversaw their case convinced them to leave the county and for 25 years and not come back. and in fact that judge wanted to do that rather than have a precedent on the books that might ultimately be challenged and happen and have what exact ultimately happened so they moved to washington dc richard mildred. richard was a bricklayer. he did construction work here. they were very unhappy particularly mildred who liked living in the country one of her children got hit by a car and that was the last blow for her and she wrote. attorney general robert kennedy for help at the suggestion of a cousin and robert kennedy. referred them to the aclu and two young aclu lawyers who were recent graduates of the law school i teach at georgetown law took up their case. and for the next you know, like i said nine years they were in and out of court and but they persisted they persisted this quiet couple that did not like publicity and they started opening up their life. there's a beautiful photo essay article about them in life magazine where they started opening up their life and talking about what they were going through and particularly mildred who had been very quiet. she started there's a documentary about them you can watch and so they became the ordinary people who became advocates for themselves and for other people. let's take some calls for cheryl cash in first barbara in new york city. good afternoon to you. good afternoon, peter. good afternoon, professor. kashian a professor in your opinion how likely is it that justice ruth bader ginsburg did not retire from the supreme court when the democrats had the senate because she didn't want to give obama the opportunity to replace her potentially with a black marriage. i i couldn't hear the last part. she wouldn't didn't want to replace her with woo. i didn't hear the black american barbara. where where did this train of thought come from? on this trainer thought came from the fact of how many black in clerks justice ginsburg had in her over 20 years on the court compared to how many for instance a jewish clerks that justice marshall gave an opportunity being a clerk for a supreme court. justice is a big boost on a resume. so i'm just curious as to what we can make at this point of justice ginsburg. i i have find. feelings about justice ginsburg. i clerked on the dc circuit when she was a judge there. what i would say is i think the reason she didn't retire was not because of worries about being replaced by a black person. i think she might have even welcomed that she if you look at her descents in the affirmative at and some of the affirmative action cases the voting rights cases. she's a strong advocate for racial equality. i think what really what was going on is that she had hit her stride. she was the i guess in some ways. she was the most senior of the liberal wing and i i think she felt that she still had a lot of work to do. i don't think she thought she was going to die when she did. i wish she had stepped down too, but i don't think she had any bad intentions around it and i'll leave it there rosalind is calling in from las vegas. good morning, roslyn. good morning. thanks for taking my call. very interesting conversation. you mentioned about your father helping start a new party for blacks to be. elected to get candy selected. i think the candidates they want to be elected and can you talk anything about the progressive democratic part? i think they're forerunner to blacks joining the democratic party. my grandmother's from south carolina was a member of that found some documents where she was a secretary of it at one point, and i know that they went to a convention in the 1940s and kind of bombarded their way into it. i don't think they wanted them to be heard because most at that time most of the blacks were still republicans. so can you talk a little bit about that for me, please? thank you. well, i don't prefer i don't know the history of the progressive democratic party that you mentioned. i'm sorry. i can't offer you specifics. i will say though that my father's party or the ndpa was similar. to a party an independent party in mississippi. that's better known the mississippi freedom democratic party. although that was really a caucus right but there's been a history of black americans experimenting with alternative parties. stokely carmichael and started the black panther in lowndes county before ndpa was started, right? so there and and yes. most many african-americans including members of my family had been republicans. my great-grandfather had been a radical republican. so there have been examples throughout american history of black americans and others in moments trying to participate in democracy through third parties, but i'm not familiar with the progressives example, i will say that the pressure ndpa. put on the regular democratic party was enormous and the regular democratic party reformed tremendously in the state to the point where when i was in high school, they were actively recruiting blacks and women to run to be delegates and i ran to be a delegate under the regular democratic party ticket and went to my first convention as an 18 year old is an alternate delegate to jimmy carter, right? so i'm sorry. i don't have specifics though about the movement you mentioned well from the agitator's daughter quote. dear diary daddy is running for governor. i don't ever hardly get to talk to him still. i am his only daughter and i support him august 11th 1970. now you referenced this cheryl cash in a minute ago the effect. of your father's activism on the family structure. did you ever resentment against some of the money he was spending and what it it did to the family unit. not until i was a rebellious teenager and trying to figure out how to pay for college, right? i mean i always was proud of my parents. my mother was a deputy director of a community action agency, you know spent her life in addition to civil rights activism. helping poor people and so i was proud of them. but yeah when and and you know, i i today i appreciate a lot more like the city of huntsville took my father's dental office by imminent domain and put a parking lot there, right? i write about this in the book. there were two my father had his own private plane and there were two attempts to sabotage the plane and he crashed in it. once he fortunately he wasn't harmed. so like the whole world the irs investigated him, right the whole world came down on him and as a teenager, you know teenagers think about themselves a lot right? i was frustrated by this, you know, we had been a very affluent family, you know, and i was i we had experienced this tremendous change in economic station, and it was in so i was resentful an angry, but i got over it and the writing the book would i really it was like my private therapy right writing. that book helped me understand the costs and consequences of being an agitator and there are many other families. that endured worse than we did, you know the bombing of homes and all this stuff and ultimately i'm very very proud of them and and the final thing i'll say about that is as i say in the book my parents gave me everything i needed to be successful in this world. i inherited two very very emotional legacies one was a commitment to academic excellence, you know, both of my parents were very very bright people who did well in education and my father in particularly distilled in me that i was excellent and i was capable of excellence so, you know, he had been a valedictorian. i became a valedictorian and then the other creed was this agitator's creed that the only value that mattered to them was that you spend your waking life advocating for people particularly your people who had less than you and i you know, i i have that. i'm not out in the streets, but i've used my platform particularly in this most recent book to do just that so that's my contribution. david's calling in from hobe sound, florida. hi, david. hi peter, nice to finally speak to you again. how you doing? earlier professor cashion said that the admissions to universities taking race into account as a positive was a constitutional decision. actually. it was a concurring opinion by justice powell. mr. backing now doctor backy god admitted to the university that discriminated against him because he was white and now we have a case coming up to the supreme court where asians are being discriminated against because their asians and because they're doing well. they've done well in high school and can't get into the universities because there's ineffective quota as there was for jewish students in the 19. 20 through to the 1950 through the 1950s, so not a constitutional decision. all right. that's david in florida professor. kashian. so baki was discriminated against in within a system of racial quotas. that's what justice powell said, but there's been subsequent cases decided by the supreme court. most recently in 2016 in the fisher case. there's fisher one. there's fisher two in both cases involving the university of texas a majority of the supreme court said that it was constitutional for universities to consider race not as a quota the baki case made that clear but as one factor among many in order to achieve for all students. the educational benefits of diversity. so yes, it is unconstitutional to have a rigid quota like existed in baki, but ironically powell in that concurrence cited the harvard plan and it's more modest use of race as one factor of among many as constitutional and so the supreme court has said this multiple times that this is within the constitution as long as universities are making a good faith effort to try everything they can to create diversity without over considering race and the lower courts who've looked in that at the facts of the harvard case have found in favor of harvard and said that they don't see evidence of intentionally excluding asians or anybody else based on the race their race, you know, the fact of the matter is harvard and other places of selective higher education most people who apply don't get in. i think a mid-rated at harvard is now like three or four percent. nobody is entitled to these places and what counts as merit is is you know, they're trying to get a diverse class where they have people from all kinds of backgrounds and no one person because can say i i'm entitled to that spot nor can you really say realistically in a system where there's a very modest in reference to race as a plus factor in order to achieve a real racial diversity. you can't honestly say this person was excluded because that person was included. so i agree with you our analysis of the concurrence in powell, but i disagree with your analysis of the facts of what is going on in harvard. let's let's hear from cornelius and alexandria, louisiana cornelius. good afternoon to welcome to book tv. good afternoon, peter and i want to bring up to quick things first miss cash it i want to thank you for taking the questions. i haven't been african-american here from alexandria, louisiana and our lieutenant governor named billy nun. gessner has going on the civil war civil rights trails and stuff and recently at camp beauregard. we had the 761st they were called patton's panthers and they fought very heroically in world war two. so we just honored them this wednesday here in alexandria, louisiana at camp beauregard and stuff and i told the call screener if you ever heard of them or would you do a book about him? i know kareem abdul jabbar has this my second thing. i grew up in the 60s. i'm 61 years old. so i grew up under segregation and integration and i know you you didn't think we did well to a certain extent i agree with you on that because there was more discipline in the segregated schools and once we became integrated, we lost a lot of that discipline and stuff like that and the supreme court has really messed up when they took the bibles out of school prayer out of school and stuff like that. so so our biblical cornelius integration is not something you support. is that correct? but he has gone but i think that's what he said when it came to education. did you hear that as well professor? yeah, so i i black americans well and integrated schools, he attributed that to me and i didn't say that in fact all the social science shows that black americans tend to do better in integrated well-resourced schools than in segregated lower resource schools, and i did well in well-resourced integrated schools the caller and i are basically the same age right? i was fortunate huntsville, alabama. i went to enter me and my brothers were integration pioneers in the early early years, but each year for 12 years of public education the schools. i attended became more integrated and they were rel. such that i was able to leave those schools and get go to vanderbilt and compete and graduate summa cum laude in electrical engineering right that said the high school that i graduated from sr. butler high school became very impoverished after i left racially resegregated so impoverished and segregated that they closed the school down and that's the story right? we had i feel fortunate to be middle-aged in some way where i got to go to school in the south at a time and in the 20-year period when it was most trying to give effect to brown v board, and we've since kind of retreated from that work and the average black or latino child in public education today tends to be in a school in which a majority their peers are minority and at least half of their peers are poor and it it does not serve those students well nor does it serve white children in highly segregated majority white schools. well not to have the experience of going to school with people of all walks of life. cheryl cash and i want to spend a little time with your newest book white space black hood opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality. what do you mean by opportunity hoarding? opportunity hoarding is the over investment and exclusion in a fluent high opportunity places that tend to be very and increasingly asian. and the disinvestment and containment elsewhere an exclusion of people elsewhere, right? that's the dichotomy white space black hood and what i argue in that book is that we have we have a system in resident of residential cast these two are at the extremes affluent majority white space concentrated black and brown poverty in between. there's a lot of difference but what i'm arguing is that society over invests in infrastructure schools all of the amenities that make life good in a fluent high opportunity settings and everyone else who can't afford to buy their way into those neighborhoods is getting a very different deal and everyone who's excluded is also subsidizing those places with their gas taxes with their income taxes sales taxes. the golden infrastructure and amenities that they get that's opportunity hoarding a more concrete example in my first chapter, you know, the struggling people of baltimore carless people who need public transportation. we're denied a light rail red line by governor larry hogan, but the relatively affluent suburbs of washington dc maryland. suburbs did get a purple line, right and it's being built right? so as an example over investment and disinvestment. you also to stick with baltimore. you also talk about the high weight and nowhere as an example of discrimination. what is that? well, there's a picture of it in my book the highway to know where you can google it and see it. the black neighborhoods not just in baltimore, but wherever large numbers of great migrants landed in this city, they were subjected to cumulative blunt force trauma of major public policies urban renewal displacing black people from downtowns in order to revitalize it for for a professional class. and then the interstate highway program you look at almost every major city that has a critical mass of black people. they tended to run the highways through their neighborhoods and in baltimore a highway was run but through the advocacy primarily of former, senator barbara mikulsky, they were able to stop that highway from running through some of the white working class neighborhoods, and they just stopped it and it was the highway to nowhere black neighborhoods endured the trauma of it, but got no benefit to be able to travel anywhere from it. now you also spend a bit of time in white space black hood talking about what a ghetto is the definition of ghetto but you call them government created ghettos. right. so the primary response to the great migrants more than six million black people moved to escape jim crow moved north and west between you know, 19 like 19 teens and 1970 and the primary response to them wherever they landed was to contain them in their own neighborhoods and through a series of policies, you know in chicago. i give example of the south side of chicago black people near where michelle obama grew up were contained in one eight square mile area with an intense density of people that whites never had to endure so you have people living on top of people. nowhere else to move and when after urban renewal, which i just mentioned hundreds of thousands of black people were displaced from their homes because blacks a lot often lived very strategically right near downtown. so they in the name of slum clearance their homes get mowed down. where were those people moved? lots of moved into new public housing projects in chicago in particular high-rise dense public housing projects and what happens when you have a policy where? and it's assigned on a racially discriminatory basis white people in public housing will live here black people will live here. right? well if you have a policy where 100% of the people in the building have to be black and poor overnight. intense concentrated black poverty is constructed right in baltimore at the turn of the century blacks were scattered throughout the city, right you could live where you could afford to live. you could try on the clothes shop where you wanted but in the teens, they start this business of racial zoning and saying okay, we're going to contain all these black people. they're too many of them coming right and they use violence racially restrictive covenants zoning to push them into areas. and then as i said concentrated by probably over time and what happens is ideas about blackness get associated with neighborhoods that are historically redlined historically disinvested in and so, you know white avoidance of living near black people becomes entrenched. and and we kind of live with that dilemma to this day and and the same neighborhoods that were redlined. you look at the the maps i encourage everyone listening to me you google redlining and name the city and you unmap will come up and you'll see the history of constructing black neighborhoods apart from white neighborhoods and systemic disinvestment in them and to this day those neighborhoods eight decades on a fed study says that they they to this day experience disinvestment and segregation. don is calling in from cyrus, texas, don, please go ahead. cypress, texas cyprus cyprus, thank you. yes, sir, and i think the professor and we want to congratulate alabama a&m university. you part of march and 100 hbc news in huntsville, alabama doing great things down through the years look at, texas. we have the to the largest publicly endowed universities university of texas, which was promoted by the reverend the late reverend jacob fontaine of one of the editors of one of the early black newspaper the gold dollar and the founders of minute the several churches here, and he was enslaved of patrick henry's great grand his great-grandson. okay to texas and we also had to realize norris right cuny who was ahead of the republican party in texas. of the black and ted that was wrong one of the republican party by the lily white republicans because of their prosperity and economic political advancement as you look at louisiana the first black the governor pbs pence back republican you look at mississippi first us senator was republican, but my point is you teach at georgetown. georgetown is part of the dr. jones who's 1619 project talks about jamestown, virginia the original 13 colonists now, the original 13 colonies did not include much of the country that we know as we know today and when you talk about georgetown the jesuit priest there so enslaved africans to plantation always in, louisiana. and you talk about william and mary college the second. hold on done. what's your what's your question? what do you want the professor to respond to? why why are we allowing? the policies that was regional is scope as far as slavery the types of slavery and the emancipation and freedom and movement and thought of african american. why do we allow the the original 13 colonial universities and the intellectual? it's a society if you will dictate how the rest of the united states as we know it's 50 states and territories. why is our history being spread like cancer through the united states? and once i think we have a lot to work with their professor cheryl cashion. well, i'm not i i didn't really quite get the question. i want to respond to a couple things. he said really quickly. so i write in the agitator's daughter about my great-grandfather's participation in reconstruction. he mentioned the black and tans versus the lily whites right? my fault. my great-grandfather was part of radical republican black and tan a republicanism and what i do in that book is i celebrate the era of reconstruction that my great-grandfather participated in and the area of the second reconstruction that my father participated in and in both of those examples were what you had was biracial coalitions participating in agitating and and politics together with black leadership and he mentioned some you know famous or they ought to be famous black people who served 706 or 700 men of colors served in the legislatures during reconstruction and and and this is a period of history. that's not known so well or or celebrated, you know, it was the first effort the first reconstruction. it's the first effort. i believe in the history of the world. um, and certainly we're still in this this struggle experiment where you had equality and politics where everybody regardless of color is supposed to get to vote supposed to get to run compete for ideas, and it's not suppressed now, it's destroyed really quickly, right? but this is what the voting rights act was about and you know my hope and prayer is that we figure out how to have a functioning multiracial politics in which people of all genders races get to express themselves at the voting box get to run and not have structures that suppress popular will paul portsmouth rhode island text message quote for an entire generation of blue-collar whites who grew up in boston during the forced busing policy disaster. it is hard to have policies like perpetual admission set-asides exclusively for non-whites who were in the same socio-economic positions as the blue collar whites moreover any opposition to this true inequality as racism versus 50 years of bad policies is what most people on the right are pushing back against okay, so i want to make it clear that pretty under the constitution and the decisions of the supreme court that we've talked about. i'm not aware of any university that sets aside slots. for individuals based on their race if they did it would be illegal, right? and we've actually only the when i wrote place not race 2014 arguing against consideration of race in admissions, but for reforming admissions processes to widen the pipeline so that working class whites and struggling circumstances and people of color would have a better chance of getting into selective a higher education. at that time only about a third of public universities were still considering race and only about 45% of private universities were still considering considering race so this idea that there is this pervasive practice of setting aside slots for people based on race is just not true. it's not true under current law and it's not true under current practice. uh, but i will admit that the stoking of resentment and division based on you know, the the real economic struggles of people including the white working class, but that has been central to republican politics for like 50 years right from you know, george from from richard nixon law and order ronald reagan welfare, queen the clintons and super predator. there's this stoking of division stoking of resentment and that is exactly what i was responding to in writing place not race. it's like you were i said, you know, we're in a very very bad place and we're getting to this place where trust in the entire project of politics and the entire project of government is declining, you know, it's falling off the roof since then the toxicity has gotten worse since then so, you know my my life and my writing has been about how we can create a functioning multiracial politics. and so but that said, i just can't support the colorblind constitutionalism coming from the right. you know that that says that you can never under any circumstance consider race when it might be necessary. it might be necessary. i just don't think that's what the framers of the 14th amendment had in mind that said, i think we all need. to bring the heat out of politics and the stoking of division out of politics. now if you can't get through on the phone lines and you still want to make a connection you can send a text message. please include your first name and your city 2 0 2 7 4 8 8 9 0 3 and those are for text messages only and linda and santa barbara, california sent what is your opinion of the effect of lyndon johnson's great society programs and it their effect on blacks and black families in particular. do you ever dialogue with thomas sole and other black conservatives? how do you feel about their point of view? okay, so the great society programs are often lambasted, but the great society is a general manner in the whole project of the civil rights revolution, which i i credit linda baines johnson for responding to a social movement and supporting and signing, you know. civil rights act of 64 voting rights act of 65 reforming integration to no longer discriminate against a people from asia for example being able to to naturalize and move here the fair housing act right? that was a social revolution and one generation. we went from a country where two-thirds, maybe three quart close to three quarters of black people live below the poverty line in 1950 the poverty rate for black americans was 72% right? these programs and policies and civil rights enforcement opened up opportunity and end in one generation. a majority of black people are not poor, you know three-quarters of black people are not poor right so that the johnson administration did a good job. of of bringing black people you know into out of a caste system and into citizenship that we still have, you know a struggle right, but i view that as positive. do i commiserate with thomas saul? no, but you know, i've been on panels with black conservatives. you know, i'm not i'm not a verse to that. i'm open to ideas. i i self-identify as a progressive i believe in civil rights and civil rights enforcement and believe in equality and and we'll keep writing and advocating for it. george is calling in from king of prussia, pennsylvania. you're on with author cheryl cashion. hello, i would like to ask the author if she thinks the black lives movement has helped the typical black community. i live here outside philadelphia where there has been a significant increase in crime and homicides. and i believe they are related because now there's less law enforcement and crime prevention. thank you. professor so i am not intimately familiar with. the state of reform or lack thereof with policing that's that's not my area of expertise. there has been admittedly a spike in violent crime since 2020 since the pandemic. there's a lot of speculation about the why of it some people would like to suggest that police have been hampered and and can't do their jobs others are speculate that there's a lot of economic deprivation coming out of the pandemic and that has it. i don't purport to know the answer to that but what i will say is that i've studied some cities that have experimented with strategies outside of policing that have achieved a decline in violent crime even in this period where it's going up and i i offer that example the example in the chapter of my book. i want to celebrate richmond, california and the 20 cities 20 odd cities in this country that have opened offices of neighborhood safety where what are they doing? they are hiring former incarcerated people people who used to be caught up in gun violence and turned their lives around people who are intimately familiar with the cycle of gun violence particularly in poor black neighborhoods and are hiring them to be disruptors to proactively they know the kids and their kids to me in some of these neighborhoods that are most likely to pull a trigger right and being interventionist with these young people and wrapping them in services being mentors to them richmond, california tried that approach and reduced gun violence by 5% for a fraction of the cost of mass incarceration and policing and i don't believe in defunding the police, but i do believe that we can't police our way out or incarcerate our way out of some of the endemic problems in high poverty neighborhoods, and we need to be innovators and the way to get there first you have to see people even people who are in engaged in gun violence as three-dimensional human beings who are capable of transformation. if given the chance, right? other cities have innovated just with giving a universal basic income at some of these high poverty neighborhoods and that and alone has experienced gun violence has lessened gun violence another city tried moving some of the public housing people try deconstrating poverty and moving some of the people out of public housing into higher opportunities and found that that helped reduce gun violence. so what i call for is setting aside, the stories we tell ourselves some of the dogma we tell ourselves constantly, you know about certain neighborhoods about the black family and free yourself up by saying bringing an attitude of care rather than predation to certain neighborhoods and once you do that you can focus on evidence-based strategies that actually may make the problem better and cost less to taxpayers. well in white space black hood cheryl cashion. you spend a bit of time with the new york city's broken windows policy 80% of young black males were probably stopped or under threat of being stopped at some point during this period was it not successful in your view? no, it wasn't successful. imagine if you are the parent of a black son or you are that black person. what sense does it make? to have a policy where 80% of the black males in the entire city are get stopped. you know often for just being on the sidewalk, you know, i had i teach law at georgetown. i have had some of my black male students. tell me about these experiences. one of them told me he he kept her running camp that he'd been stopped 19 times right and and you know, he was a law-abiding citizen right and and think about the distrust that that kind of blanket approach where every black male a lens of thug is applied to them a lens of presumed thug versus presumed citizen. so the the state over invests in policing a lot of wasted time and resources doesn't didn't necessarily reduce crime at all. you create distrust of policing your communities are less likely to cooperate with the police to solve crime. i cite a study in the last chapter of the book where in chicago alone, they're spending. 851 million dollars per inner-city block every four years a million dollars per inner city block every four years to incarcerate people there right right almost a trillion dollars. no, almost a billion dollars every four years to incarcerate does it has it made has it made the gun violence go down in chicago? no. um, so what i call for is just again, focusing on communities particularly historically defunded high poverty communities and seeing the people there as citizens and assets particularly the people who are potentially engaged in gun violence and giving them an alternative to the life. they're leading. that's what richmond did they they created what they call a peacemaker fellowship, right? it was only like two dozen young men who were doing the shooting or likely to the shooting and so they say they brought him in and said, what do you need to change your life around? you know, do you need behavioral therapy? you need drug treatment? you need a job you need training you need to get out of here, you know, and they just help them develop a life map for transformation, right and it worked. it worked. next call for cheryl cash and comes from kelvin in portland, oregon kelvin. good afternoon. good afternoon. let's see spanner. thank you for taking the call professor. i just want to say that call in and thank you for your your leadership in writing the books and and your narrative because i believe that it it allows a those of us who don't do not follow the policy and politics very closely to dispel the intellectual dishonesty and to have that done is really fantastic. so, thank you for your leadership and writing the books and i am my family is from birmingham, alabama. and i have a question to you professor of reference to the archaic political structure in the south and do you see or any thoughts on how that that can change to to push more? on democratic thinking folks to the to the electoral finish line because over the past 10 years. so on the folks that have run ran have had a systemic leadership in and and being the purveyors of racism and yet they've received funding year after year and been been on the front line of finishing. the victoria's in calvin. can you give an example of referring to? well, i i don't want to practice the labeling the best historically has been done to african american men, so i won't do that to other folks. i'll just keep the real gent in general and and just say that that that i i want to thank c-span in the professor for her analysis on social issues. all right, we're gonna leave it there kelvin. thank you for calling in any response for that caller professor. i just want to say thank you calvin. at your your comment makes me feel good. i appreciate your your and your kind words. text message no city no name. don't you express your social justice commitment through your art. are you showing your art anywhere now? is there somebody who knows you really i know this person is? all right. so one of the things that i do to just heal myself and take me away from the troubles of the world is i paint. i i i'm a practicing artist and i have a i'm in an exhibit right now at the zenith gallery in washington. we just had the opening i did a series of collages of black american black women surrounded in nature and forms including brianna, brianna taylor where i just i just wanted to surround her in. things i felt she deserved, you know, and and it was trying to like heal her and heal me and and just focus on beauty. i think we just i think we just showed an image of serena williams. yeah, you go back to that. yeah that image of serena. yes. i can see that. yeah. yeah we go serena if you're watching i hope you don't mind i was so inspired by you on that wheaties box and i made a collage, you know, i just wanted to to surround her because i thought she deserved it in in beauty. she's such an inspiration but the lawyer in me under the council of my husband made sure that i didn't you know that i added my own art to it and did not appropriate the image so jokingly said, you know serena champ how to avoid a copyright infringement. is your husband also a lawyer? he's a lawyer. yes. is he a professor? well, no. he's stepped down as general counsel at a tech. company in baltimore. he's worked for a series of tech companies. he's an intellectual property lawyer. my wonderful husband and zenith gallery here in washington. how long will it be up? i think the show is up to through this. it just opened on the fourth. it's up through the 25th or 26 you can go to zenith calories, uh website to see it. next call for artist and professor and author cheryl cashin tony, fort worth, texas thank you professor. keshan in the last few years. i've heard about critical race theory, and i'm not i'm a reader so i had never heard about that before now. i wanted about it ever since i wanted your thoughts on it. the superintendents in education here in texas are resigning left and right over this issue. we have nine that are returned just in the dallas-fort worth area. and especially in the area of the white student being hurt getting their feelings hurt or feeling the inferior because of teaching of critical erased dairy. could you give me your on that place? okay. thank you so much for that question. i thought peter was going to ask me that question. so i appreciate that. you brought it up. so first off critical race theory is was developed by legal academics. to the extent that it was taught at all or is tardell has been in higher education mainly in law schools, mainly and the idea two main tenants of critical race theory one. is that systems of racial disadvantage of racism or but you know systems of racial disparity racial disadvantage racial inequality are embedded in our legal structure, right? we have laws that may be facially neutral. they're not like the old jim crow where they say, you know blacks have to live here whites have to live here separate water fountains, but they have those consequences they have consequences of structural inequality. and you know, you could read my book a white space black hood, and i show that we have a system of residential casts where we have very separate and unequal neighborhoods despite having facially neutral laws. so that's the first tenant the second tenant. is that the civil rights revolution that we had which was mainly an anti-discrimination we pass laws that banned discrimination against individuals, you know and housing and employment etc right that those weren't up the to the task of eliminating this these structural systemic systems of racial inequality, right? that's basically what crt does and it teaches particularly law students to think critically about our systems and the third thing i would add and i am not a critical race theorist. i mean, i don't teach critical race theory in my classes, but the third thing i would add that i think is part of this inquiry and has always been there is that this is the systems that have been constructed that oppress racial minorities also harm other people, right? so it's a way of teaching people to think critically about our systems. that's what it is, right. it is not taught. uh, it is not taught to in k through 12. it's it's not i mean and but crt as a label has been used and frankly weaponized. to divide people and now we have you know screaming matches at at board school board meetings and fight so, you know people are asking for books even just stories that center non-white children are you know, some of them are just being attacked as the we should ban these books, right? even just you know, i just read an article on alabama.com about a session where a superintendent was telling people t. it's black history month having some curriculum that teaches some black history is not crt. so i think it's unfortunate and i think that what what happened and and i'll be honest are you know, the previous president? he brought it up during the election. you know, we're gonna scrub crt from from from everything and now it's it's like so many other things a a point of dividing people and upsetting people. i don't know about the specifics in texas, but it is troubling just to hear that school superintendents are resigning over this. i'm not of any curriculum. that's taught to children that's designed to make a white children feel bad about themselves. you know, for example, i mean i teach a course race in american law when i teach about the era of slavery and the laws that existed i'm not trying to make the white students in my class feel bad about themselves and there's no reason they should they didn't create this system. we have a half hour left on in-depth with our guest professor. cheryl cashion. 202 is the area code 748-8200 if you live in the east and central time zones, and you want to dial in 7 4 8 8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones can't get through on the phone lines. you want to send a text message? 2 0 2 7 4 8 8 9 0 3 is the number to text into please include your first name and your city stephanie's and deerfield beach, florida. you're on with cheryl cassin. thank you. wonderful. thank you so much professor for your this is so many topics. i just appreciate it so much. i wanted to ask you your thoughts on first of all, i appreciate what you said about biden being just transparent about the promise that he made that he wanted to. select a black woman for the supreme court, which doesn't seem that radical, but apparently said everyone's hair on fire, but i wonder your thoughts about what clyburn maybe was suggesting in his supported michelle childs that academic diversity is also important and that it would be really wonderful if if biden shows someone who was obviously intellectually qualified and in character and just in every way but was also from a public university which i think even scalia said we need to get away from a supreme court that is made up of just people from harvard and yale. i just want to your your thoughts on that and if that's like a bridge too far if biden were to choose a black woman who wasn't from a yellow harvard. absolutely, it would not be abridged too far. so it's first of all, thank you for the question. it's an excellent question right part of the problem with the way we have gone about selecting supreme court justices is we've very much narrowed the pipeline right and some of that has to do with the the politicization of the nomination process and how it makes it very very hard to nominate anyone who has a paper trail who's remotely expressed an opinion about anything. all right in a gridlocked congress, you know, so what they've done tend to do is nominate almost exclusively now, court of appeals judges circuit court judges who you know all the only paper trail for the most part that they have of late is is is just a judicial opinions and as you say right a lot of the people that get nominated went to harvard or yale. i am proud that i went to harvard law school. i enjoyed it very much. thank you harvard, but it creates this perception that anybody else who doesn't come from that very same distinct pipeline is somehow to use an unfortunate phrase that someone using a tweet recently is lesser than right as if experience in different walks of life isn't relevant to the project of judging when it very much is right. so i think we should be looking we shouldn't just be looking at people who went to harvard or yale. we shouldn't just be looking at men. we shouldn't just be looking at. you know, we shouldn't be excluding women or women of color, but we also should be thinking about district court judges, right, you know district court judges, they try cases. they're there with human beings seeing the justice system in action, right? we rarely i can't remember the last time we we put nominate somewhat pick someone for the court who came from the trial experience as i believe this this this justice this person you mentioned would so just as i said in place not race, i think we need to expand the pipeline to institutions and absolutely having someone come from a fine public university. they're wonderful public institutions out there. they you know, there's genius everywhere in this country everywhere, right? so i i applied that and yeah, there will be inevitably if this particular person that you're talking about. i'm forgetting her name, but she's the just the judge from south carolina who is nominated to the court of appeals, but they're thinking about holding it. we'll see what happens with her, but i lost my train of thought i apologize. i think you had been talking about the the court i apologize. i apologize too the court right below the supreme court the right, but my point was that there's genius everywhere. oh, i say if that particular person gets nominated inevitably. there will be some snark particularly on the internet, you know, there's too much snark on the internet of people suggesting that yes, you know get a black woman and she's from a lesser than institution and and there will be commentary like that, but we need to resist that we need to resist that although i'm not i'm not endorsing anyone in particular, but i am endorsing the project of opening up the pipeline to institutions be it higher education or c-span or my you know, or or any university to people from all walks of life to enable us to to be a more cohesive country. angela, san mateo, california, please. go ahead with your question or comment. good morning. thanks for taking my call. i wanted to address going back to tst can you hear me? we're listening, please go ahead. okay. thank you. okay, angela don't look at your tv. turn down the volume on your phone. don't look at your tv. just go ahead and talk. we can both hear you. or very well. thanks ever so much. good morning. again. my question is i found it most intriguing that people who intend to want to dub down education phase the t-over city and not necessarily what the children need to be to go on to university. we usually comes from people themselves who are well-educated and have gone to universities. when you graduated high school it was a difficult time. high school today is still is a difficult time. but i don't agree with dubbing down for the black children if you can literate so can they and it does not take going to the mall and the week and it takes another thing to do that but not the dummy down because the to dumb the stupid they're too black did to pour they cannot make it. i i don't understand that. thank you, ma'am. cheryl cash in the so-called dumbing down of education i thought she was talking about. scrapping standardized tests and saying that was dumbing down because i thought she said the psat the sat, but take it in any way you want. well, that's what i thought. she was. i want to be clear that my advocacy is for colleges focusing on the strongest predictors of success in college completion that they should focus on that. and again, it's cumulative high school gpa and the willingness to do exactly what the caller was suggesting to forego. recreation to do the work and you know. admissions is a bit like detective work, right but there's you can see the evidence from recommendations and from you know, what you find out about a person about how many hours a week are they putting in right? but cumulative high-speed school gpa, you know, i graduated. back in the day with a 4.0. i made an a and every single class. i took right. i only made one b in four years when i went to vanderbilt as well right at my sat scores were. okay, they weren't stratospheric, but they would not have predicted that i would have graduated summa cum laude and electrical engineering but if anybody had interviewed me or paid attention, they they would have realized that when i got to vanderbilt i was going to be in the library on friday and saturday nights when no one else was there, right? so that means um, so i'm not an advocate of dumbing down and i say to people to young people on tape take the most challenging classes available to you right now. i can't speak to what she means in terms of k through 12 education and dumbing down. i think you know, i will say that black and latino children in public school today tend to get a kind of soul-killing wrote education teaching to test rather than the liberal stimulating kind of inquiry that students in very advantage schools tend to get which is unfortunate. what was the b in at vanderbilt? it was an advanced. uh my last semester it was some kind of very advanced digital electrical class. i can't remember the name of it. i've conveniently forgotten of it forgotten it but sharon, woodland, north carolina, please go ahead. hey, cheryl, and hello to you. hello, and thank you so much. for this wonderful exciting the conversation i just feel like she's just so knowledgeable. i'm gonna go out and buy all for those good. thank you five. we do need to have these discussions. and i heard someone ask you. what do you do to kind of get all this stuff back in the back of your head and enjoy? yourself and i know you have to escape from it because it's so much. but you have been um picked out for such a time as this. and i thank you so much. sarah sharon. can you tell us a little bit about yourself? well, i am a nurse. i have a master's degree in nursing education. app talk nurse and then eastern, north carolina and just so many things. i do believe that education is important. um, i do believe that we have embedded institutional racial. discrimination and it is very hurtful. when when you go into a nursing institution to care for people in eastern, north carolina? that you run into these situations what i wanted to ask her is, how do you continue to not be an agitator. but to help upcoming nurses to get into an institution using their academic abilities and to not be distracted by the inequality even of advancement in. the institution of nursing. thank you, ma'am. well, first all i just want to thank you your words are mean so much to me. i don't know you but you're you're words. your intonation reminds me of people i love. back home in alabama. so, thank you. and i want to thank you for being a nurse right, you know nurses are having a very difficult time. they're on the front lines right now with a pandemic. it's killed close to 900,000 people. and so thank you for that. i i don't have a specific answer for you about nursing itself. um and how individual nurses i assume that you're a black american you sound like one to me that you know that as you struggle in institutions, and and you said how can we advance things help people and not get distracted by whatever else is going on institutionally or inequalities institutionally. i mean, that's a challenge. for a lot of people it's a difficult time. i personally i'm a christian baptist. um, i take sustenance, you know with daily prayer. for strength i prayed before coming here today. i read the bible before i go to bed, you know, everybody has to find a way. to make it in this country, but i'll say that having an attitude that the other is not the enemy is helpful, right? you know, i i teach conlaw one to first years and i have people from all walks of life from all intellectual interest political commitments, you know, and i try to not have an us them attitude about these wonderful young people who are put before me right and, you know, even when i engage with, you know engage with intellectual approaches to things that i don't necessarily agree with right and i think we all need to sort of take it down to the human level not see people that we are dealing with or not dealing with is somehow, you know bad evil people, you know and take it down to the human level and try to meet people halfway and if you if you if you can't agree on something perhaps you just you know, smile and say have a good day and and keep on going. i hope that something i've is useful to you. every author who's on in depth we ask for their favorite books and what they're reading now. here's what cheryl cashin told us. favorite books a mercy by toni morrison the fire next time by james baldwin and narrative of the life of frederick douglass an american slave by frederick douglass. currently reading as she mentioned a minute ago the bible the new international version. harlem shuffle colson whitehead's new book the sweet fly paper of life by roy decar carava and langston hughes beaufort delaney and james baldwin through the unusual door. this is edited by stephen wick swing times by zadie smith and the price of the ticket by james baldwin mr. baldwin's name came up three times. on your list cheryl cash and why is that? well, nobody beats james baldwin is a you know 20th century writer for for me. for the power of his language for the truth-telling it would and and his own emotion and passionate would just jump off off the page, you know. i've worked very very hard fifth book. to be a writer and to be a good writer who's i have literary ambitions and you know, i find myself going back to baldwin and he he was also a writer who was engaged with the civil rights movement engaged with the civil rights of his time. i i try to be so he's inspires me on so many levels, but i'm a nonfiction writer and he's for me among the best of nonfiction writers who were commenting on what i'm often coming what i permanently commenting on was the circumstances of race racial the african-american experience of trying to gain full personhood, right? so i never get enough of him, right? yeah. i've been i've been rereading baldwin myself, and he's one that you got to turn off the tv you can't be distracted by other things because of the language in his you want to absorb it a little bit. right, and that's why i read you know for me reading is kind of healing at the end of the day no devices other than my kindle right, but there's something there's nothing more intimate to me than reading. and and trying to get what an author's saying it's like the author is speaking just to me when i'm doing it, right? so ah, and then you know, i don't know. i don't know why i'm so enamored of him, but i am text message something you write about in white space black hood and this is from christian and simsbury, connecticut. what is your opinion of gentrification, especially in atlanta? well, you know i used to spend a lot of time in atlanta growing up in alabama and i worked for two different law firms there in summer jobs, but i haven't spent much time in atlanta in a while. but what i hear about gentrification i have to go on what i hear and you know, it's going on in other places. there's a lot of displacement of black people or what people are discovering people want to be back in cities now, right and the housing prices are going through the roof in a lot of desired cities, and so people are discovering that black neighborhoods are more affordable. so we are getting i think that's what they're alluding to. that's part of the residential caste system. i talk about i don't engage with it. the very much in the book, but i'll say that. okay, so i didn't say this yet, and i'm not plugging this book today, but i say that the three main processes of residential class happened to be anti-black processes. boundary maintenance keeping boundaries opportunity hoarding and stereotype-driven surveillance, which people are familiar with if you've just been watching the videos and and things like that. it's so happens that the surveillance of black bodies tends to spike in gentrifying neighborhoods. where? a new group is coming in. and they may not be comfortable with some of the cultural norms of people who've been in the neighborhood. i tell it devastating story of a 105 year old dominican man, who'd been playing dominoes on his sidewalk. for four decades in spanish harlem having the police called on him hundreds and hundreds of times. so he finally stopped doing it, right. that's an aspect of gentrification. that's particularly troubling. so that's i but i can't speak to exactly what's happening in atlanta. but as i read that sounds like a lot of what's happening in terms of formerly. majority black neighborhoods turning turning over but i don't have specific knowledge leon. lincoln, nebraska, please. go ahead. yes, but just wanted to thank you for having me on today. what an appreciate you taking my call i wanted to. maybe talk about the situation and i don't know if she has any thoughts on that matter but on affirmative action in which we're dealing with and it has been a i think in my opinion a good tool and we have the situation in the nfl where we're looking at a black guy. coat ahead coach that has been overlooked not because of this qualifications, but apparently it has to do with possibly the ownership of these teams and who is who's in position to make these decisions. so if if it's not affirmative action where we can in a perfect world, we would need these types of things. but since we're not in the perfect world, we need something to eliminate these scenarios where people are qualified just as if the ones that we're talking about, there's a number of situations even to the supreme court. you know, you can look at the qualifications of these women, which i think. well qualified to be in these positions and so we'll having a conversation if they're qualified and why we're picking them and so on and so forth. so, what's your thought on that? so as i said before i support affirmative action. as a tool to diversify institutions. i am not particularly knowledgeable about the nfl. i sort of skim the headline of this particular coach you're talking about but america is a bewilderingly diverse country and i say that in a positive way shouldn't use that phrase but it's it's a an incredibly diverse country and that's what makes the american experiment exciting. it's what brings vitality to this country and the research shows that companies tend to do better with a diverse workforce you when you when you have people who have you know, more different perspectives brought to bear you tend to get a better decision. and so affirmative action well-designed affirmative action that not racial quotas, right but it makes institutions better and it puts pressure on institutions to widen the talent pool what you know to to break out of of habits that tend to reify. advantage right the tend to reify the same old networks right and expands looking for talented qualified people. i'm not aware of any advocate of affirmative action who's saying that we should be hiring unqualified people what affirmative action does when properly designed is it helps institutions find qualitative qualified people who've historically not been in the pipeline historically not been considered and that's a good thing as far as i'm concerned. very quickly, joseph and syracuse, new york, please. go ahead. we have about a minute left. yes. hello. i have a lot of questions continue because the guy that answer the phone could not hear me. can you hear me? we can hear you just fine. why don't you go ahead and ask your priority question? i well i had a lot of questions, but my listen the more i had questions of the last 67 was one of the last things to the baptist. okay. i am a baptist also. but if you're saying baptist is what i want to know i'm saved and i am i've been dunked in the water. yes. absolutely. well here in our here in our last minute. i want to read a text from leslie in coming, georgia. i am enjoying your conversation. i have to say that i can't take my eyes off your necklace. it is absolutely gorgeous and reflects your artistic sensibilities. so thank you for noticing that unrelated to our conversation, but and i want to close with this and this is from the failures of integration. professor cash in writes i think the possibilities for integration could be much enhanced if more white people and more middle and upper-class people could become more comfortable with not always being overwhelmingly dominant numbers. the point of integration is not to pursue it for its own sake although it has its own inherent social benefits. the point of integration is the same as the core motivation of the civil rights movement itself. integration then and now is the best route to equal opportunity for everybody is what she wrote. cheryl cashion is the author of five books. the most recent is white space black hood opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality. she's been our guest for the past two hours on indepth. thank you for being war general who commanded the confederate army in northern virginia. >> host: allen guelzo let's begin with your latest book, robert e lee a life, who was he before the civil war, what was his reputation? >> guest: he was best known for two things, son of a famous revolutionary war hero and that was the famed cavalry commander light horse harry lee, the one who served under washington and in fact,

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