A century ago, the tool was blatant redlining. Today, the mechanics of anti-Black housing segregation entail resistance to affordable housing, underinvestment in public transportation, and the over-policing of African American communities.

Those practices have rendered geographic lines “that divide America into racialized spaces of high and low opportunity,” Georgetown University’s Sheryll Cashin says. She calls it residential caste, a social and economic stratification cemented by discriminatory policies that trap Black people in impoverished neigh­bor­hoods while diverting fund­ing to afflu­ent, predom­in­antly white areas.

Cashin, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights, and Social Justice at Georgetown University and a former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, examines how our country got here and what it will take to end these corrosive exclusionary practices in a discussion drawing from her book White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality.

The event coincides with a special exhibition, REDLINED: Cities, Suburbs, and Segregation, on display at the Johnson County Museum in Overland Park through January 7, 2023.

Cashin, who lives in Washington, D.C., holds a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School and a master’s degree in English law from the University of Oxford. She served as White House director of community development during the Clinton administration, overseeing urban policy and community development initiatives and advising on community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She was also staff director for the Community Empowerment Board in the office of Vice President Al Gore.

She left public service to join the faculty at Georgetown in 1996.

Her presentation is presented in partnership with the Center for Midwestern Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City History Department and Johnson County Museum.