Improperty

Abstract

The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxically unsettle the logics of accumulation and enclosure that are proper to the property form. I introduce improperty to contextualize nascent Black land projects that are funded through the nonprofit industrial complex, online crowdsourcing, and microreparations. These projects simultaneously reproduce the capitalized relations they wish to supplant and create exciting new possibilities for decolonial land work, minimizing the dependence on commerce and the settler state that has traditionally hampered Black farms. Embracing this simultaneity can deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Black land stewardship.