Sheryll Cashin is a child of the civil rights movement. Literally. Her father, a dentist in Huntsville, Alabama, founded an independent political party in 1968, as the state's segregationist governor, George Wallace, made a bid for the presidency. Six years earlier, when Cashin was just 4 months old, her mother had taken her to a sit-in, where she was arrested, babe in arms. "That's how committed my family was to the idea of inclusion," Cashin says.

Cashin went on to study at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and at Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review. She was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and an adviser on inner-city community development in the Clinton White House. Today, she is a law professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches "Race and American Law," among other courses.

But when Cashin looks back on the civil rights movement, as she has in her book, The Failures of Integration (2004), and her memoir, The Agitator's Daughter (2008), she sees both its accomplishments and its shortcomings. "Only about 5 to 10 percent of American neighborhoods are stably integrated," she says. She doesn't blame racism, per se—her faith in Americans' ability to coexist runs deep—but public policies that have encouraged whites and blacks to live separate lives long after official segregation laws were wiped from the books.

But these anachronistic policies, Cashin says, are destined to die. Demographers predict that by 2050, the United States will be "majority minority," meaning that whites will be outnumbered by non-whites. California, Hawaii, Texas, and New Mexico are already mostly nonwhite, as are more than three hundred counties across the United States. "In the 21st century, you are not going to be able to avoid diversity. We can continue the way of the bulwark and try to be fragmented, and people can try to buy their way into an exclusive neighborhood," she says. Or we can "make that transition in a way in which opportunity is going to be broadly available to the masses."

She is confident that we will choose the latter path: "We have no other option."



Q Why was there this "failure of integration" once we broke the back of segregation?
A I want to underscore that we did have a chief victory with the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement transformed this country seemingly overnight. We went from a country where 80 percent of the people in surveys would say openly that "I would move if a black person moved into my neighborhood," to where a vast majority of people would say the opposite: "No, I wouldn't move. In fact, I might be happy that there's some diversity coming to my neighborhood."

In opinion polls, the vast majority of Americans will say that they believe America should be an integrated society and that they think of America as a place where no one should be limited in their access to anything based on race. But where we're falling down is [with] our public policies, [which] actually are premised on the idea that people should be separated based on race and class. We no longer have de jure segregation where the state mandated that the races be separate. But so many of our major public policies steer us in the segregated direction.

[Consider] local zoning. America has more local governments than most westernized nations because we've bought this religion of local power that [says] democracy should occur at the lowest level, closest to the city. It fosters this parochialism and this idea that we have to zone to create the best tax base possible. So we won't have garden-variety, affordable apartments in our town because that doesn't give us high property values. Another is historic policies where the federal government taught banks and the lending industry to be fearful of neighborhoods where the classes mix, so investment in housing tends to be skewed toward segregated areas. I could go on and on.


Q Some say even in a heterogeneous nation like ours that separation is natural, that people do not come together naturally.

A There's a dissonance between what we say about liking diversity and what we actually choose. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. There's more demand for stable, integrated neighborhoods than there are neighborhoods to fill that demand. If you're a black person living in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area, and you have the economic wherewithal and the credit score to get a mortgage—which is difficult in these times—the market doesn't give you a lot of options. Either you can choose to live in a neighborhood where blacks are few, or you can choose to live in a neighborhood where blacks are a majority if not an overwhelming majority. There's not a lot of in-between.

It's not surprising that a lot of African Americans might choose to live in a neighborhood where their own group is in the majority. That's human nature. But public policy doesn't have to be premised on the idea that people should be separated.


Q What approaches would make communities more integrated?

A Number one: inclusionary zoning—a policy which says explicitly that any new development above a certain size has to have low-income or moderate-income units. Some places like Montgomery County have had public policies on the books for thirty years requiring [that], in any new residential development, about 10 to 15 percent of the units be affordable units. And that county, because of that public policy, is much stabler. It's a very diverse county, and it doesn't have intense pockets of concentrated minority poverty, it doesn't have ghettos, it doesn't have barrios, because they've chosen to have public policies that foster inclusion. There's more opportunity in the housing market, and there's more opportunity to find good schools that happen to be both diverse and good.

Another [policy] is MTO [Moving to Opportunity] housing mobility programs which give people vouchers and the ability to try to live in a variety of areas.


Q When they tried MTO in Baltimore about ten years ago, a congressman, Bob Ehrlich, who later became governor, led the fight in Baltimore County to "Say No to MTO," and raised racist, populist anger about MTO and stopped it. So how does public policy change this behavior without being onerous and authoritarian?

A I don't pretend that these are easy issues. MTO is one of the most controversial policies because of the specter of fear. And let's be frank: Whenever you talk about affordable housing, the fear factor is non-blacks' fear of blacks. What comes to people's minds is some ghetto-acting black person coming to my neighborhood. And the response is "H-E-L-L no."

But what is the alternative? Demographics are rapidly changing this country, and they're going to change no matter what. The question is: How does America respond to those changes and harness them? If you think about what America is going to look like virtually everywhere in 2050, if the majority of the workforce is going to be black, brown, yellow, America is not going to be able to be competitive if you haven't built a society where the vast majority of Americans are able to get an excellent education and good skills and be cultivated as citizens who feel like they have a stake in this society.

I think we have no choice but to go the way of inclusion, and I'm actually optimistic about our ability to do that. There's a lot of positive things going on in this country. You can see it in media. I don't want to be too simplistic or flippant about this, but increasingly in media you'll see images of interracial couples. Mainstream organizations and companies—Banana Republic [advertisements] featuring the black girl and the white guy in an intimate pose. I think there is this ethos of excitement about diversity.


Q There's a great chapter in your book about all the intentionally interracial neighborhoods in this country that have thrived.

A A number of neighborhoods in the '50s that were majority Jewish affirmatively decided—with the wave of the civil rights movement and changes in housing laws—when blacks started moving in that they were going to consciously try to be inclusive and remain integrated and fight blockbusting. And there are a number of examples of neighborhoods like that: West Mount Airy, Philadelphia; Shaker Heights, Ohio. It took an intentionality to create that environment.

I'm encouraged by the sort of optimistic, multiracial coalitions that are beginning to form in places like Baltimore. The two organizations in American society that are doing the best job at this are the Gamaliel Foundation—and they have affiliates in about fifty cities, and they basically teach grassroots, mass-based organizing, the kind of stuff that happened in the civil rights movement—and the Industrial Areas Foundation. There is an Industrial Areas affiliate in Baltimore called BUILD [Baltimoreans United In Leadership and Development]. [See Urbanite, May '08.]  Basically, there is a grassroots movement—you might think about it as the civil rights movement of the 21st century. There are church-based, regional organizations that are building these relationships across these artificial boundaries of race and class and getting to saner policies.

Just a year ago in New Jersey, the Gamaliel affiliates succeeded in getting a piece of legislation passed. Now, because of this law, every single locality in New Jersey has to have its fair share of affordable housing. And that is a revolutionary concept. And the way they did it was they did the labor-intensive work of building these coalitions.



Q We've even seen it internationally. When you saw the hundred thousand people in Copenhagen, from every country in the world, crossing every racial line on the planet, fighting for a planet that we can all live on—that was amazing.


A Yes. I don't want to politicize this too much, but you saw that picture a lot during the 2008 election. When Barack Obama would speak, he was speaking to extraordinarily diverse audiences. And that's what our world looks like. And the people who prevail in the 21st century are going to be the people and the political parties that speak to a broad range of people. If you are only speaking to your own identity group or your own single-issue group, ultimately you're not likely to be very successful. You are not going to have any choice, increasingly, but to learn the skills of speaking across boundaries of difference, be it in the corporate sector or in schools, whatever. It's the people who are culturally dexterous who are going to be successful in this century.


Q Would you consider yourself optimistic?

A I would be lying if I didn't say I have moments of despair. But I go back often to King. When I'm down, I'll read that letter from a Birmingham jail. It's profound, and if Martin Luther King had accepted the pessimism of some of his critics, even critics within his own camp, he never would have written that letter, and he never would have believed in a vision that—some people couldn't see it. It was only around the corner.

If you give into cynicism or your fears or pessimism, there's so much that you could be missing. And so I choose to be optimistic. Because I see glimpses of this beautiful ethos that could be. So I will get up every day and fight for that vision. You know, there's always going to be struggle. Things could always be better than they are. There is value and meaning in living a life in which you spend much of your waking hours fighting for what you believe in, even when there are going to be days when you fall down or your group falls down and doesn't get what it hoped for.