Welcome to Kerr Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Professor Cheryl Cashin. She is Professor of Law,

Civil Rights, and Social Justice at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the author

of the book, White Space, Black Hood, Opportunity Horting and Segregation in the Age

of Inequality. She has published in academic journals and written for Politico, New York

Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Professor Cashin, thank you so much for joining

me. It's such a pleasure to be with you today, Nathan. Well, I've been looking forward to it.

I want to start where the book starts. You begin this book with a series of quotes.

You take quotes from stretching from 1788 to the present day. And you clearly have selected these particular quotes with a reason.

And you start with a quote from Thomas Jefferson, predicting that essentially because of the

nature of the differences between the black and white races, there will never be integration

or real emancipation. And you go through a series of

sort of overtly racist quotes from the next 100, 150 years of United States history, from everyone

from Alexander Stephen, Vice President of the Confederacy, to John C. Calhoun, to just everyday white people sort of commenting on the lengths to which they would go to prevent racial equality.

But then the quotes sort of evolve over time, and you have quotes from Richard Nixon talking about the urban slums.

You have quotes from Ronald Reagan talking about the welfare queen.

You have a quote from Bill Clinton on why he is rejecting the Sentencing Commission's recommendation

to equalize crack and powder cocaine disparities. You want to have a quote from Bill Maher talking

about, I think, Michael Brown saying he was acting like a thug. And of course, Donald Trump,

also talking about thugs in the wake of George Floyd's killing. And so I want to start by asking you why you put

those particular quotes together and what you see as the continuity between them.

Well, thank you. That's a wonderful question. And in all my book promotion, you're the first one who's asked this. And I'm like, yay, yay. So, and the prologue has a title, stories they told themselves and a nation, right? And what I'm doing here is showing the long arc of American history when it comes to anti-Black suppression.

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