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February 20th, 2025
On Wednesday, February 19, Purdue Libraries and the Black Cultural Center hosted a lecture by Georgtown Professor of Law and author Sheryll Cashin titled “Residential caste: How West Lafayette can transcend segregation and opportunity hoarding” in honor of Black History Month.
About the lecture
How does a community with a history of segregation and disenfranchisement move forward to heal, repair, and transform?
West Lafayette is similar to other cities where Black migrants have settled. As a law professor at Georgetown University, Cashin applied her theories to the specific contexts of various communities, drawing on examples of hope, transformation, and healing from different cities.
“America is where the residential caste is destroying 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 of this country anymore. We’re not the land of opportunity in this system of residential caste,” said Cashin in the lecture’s introductory video.
Cashin discussed Indianapolis and West Lafayette, and how both cities are affected by the residential caste system—a system of segregation that separates wealthy white neighborhoods from impoverished Black neighborhoods. This system creates inequality and opportunity gaps that are passed down through generations. She also talked about “redlining,” the illegal practice of denying financial services to neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity. Her lecture took a deep into the history of these practices and how they appear now in the 21st century.
She also provided hope and ways to begin repairing the residential caste system. Repair involves forming a multiracial coalition that advocates for policies promoting and uplifting vulnerable populations. Dismantling and repairing residential caste necessitates perfecting local multiracial democracy, which W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as abolition democracy.
“The residential caste is born of a very peculiar history of anti-blackness. If you can set aside that decades-long pathologizing of those folks, it frees your focus on evidence-based strategies that work and actually cost a lot less than what the state is spending now for surveilling, containing, policing and incarcerating these people,” she concluded.
About Sheryll Cashin
Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, authors works focused on race relations and inequality in America. Her most recent publication, “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality,” released in September 2021, reveals how the government established “ghettos” and wealthy white neighborhoods, solidifying a system of residential caste in the U.S. that serves as a core element of inequality, while advocating for abolition.
Cashin is a prominent member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. She has served as an advisor on urban and economic policy during her time in the Clinton White House, focusing on community development in inner-city neighborhoods. Additionally, she was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists, she now lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons.
View her website to learn more about Cashin and her work.
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