Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Black History Month: Save the date for a lecture by Sheryll Cashin, hosted by Purdue Libraries and the Black Cultural Center

December 16th, 2024

In honor of Black History Month, Purdue Libraries and the Black Cultural Center invites you to attend a lecture by Sheryll Cashin titled, “Residential caste: How West Lafayette can transcend segregation and opportunity hoarding” on Wednesday, February 19, 10:30–11:30 AM in STEW 202.

About the lecture

How does a community with a history of segregation and disenfranchisement move forward to heal, repair, and transform?

West Lafayette is not different from other cities where Black migrants landed. As a professor of law at Georgetown University, Cashin has experience applying her theories to the particulars of multiple communities, with examples of hope, transformation, and repair from other cities. Repair requires building a multiracial coalition that supports policies that include and lift up vulnerable people. Dismantling and repairing residential caste requires perfecting local mulitracial democracy, or what W. E. B. DuBois called abolition democracy.

About Sheryll Cashin

Author of works centered around race relations and inequality in America, Sheryll Cashin is a professor of law at Georgetown University. Her latest book “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality” published in September 2021 shows how the government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of U.S. inequality, while issuing a call for abolition.

Cashin is an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council; worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods; and served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists, and currently resides in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons.

View her website to learn more about Cashin and her work.