Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Abstract

In Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, leading public intellectual and Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, traces African Americans’ relationship with the real estate market. Taylor uses the paradigm of “predatory inclusion” to illustrate this history. In so doing she departs from racial liberalismwhich sees the fight for equal access, especially into consumer markets, as an engine for the liberation of Black people. Similarly, Taylor also avoids the present liberal reflex to center the psychological or non-material elements of whiteness in histories of housing, as has become common. Through the frame of predatory inclusion she argues, and then analyzes the ways in which, racism and its history, have categorically altered the terms on which African Americans were able and incentivized to enter these consumer markets. Race for Profit joins works like Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Antero Pietila’s Not in My Neighborhood, and Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, by highlighting the federal government’s role in providing and segregating housing in the United States. But Taylor’s book notably breaks from Rothstein’s best-seller by deflating the idea of a separate public and private sector in housing. Race for Profit clarifies time and again that the state “did not act in a vacuum” (10). By focusing instead on the political economy of housing, the book delivers a brutal assessment of the public-private construction of the market itself. With her attention to political economy, Taylor is in critical discussion with a wave of recent books like Rachel Rolnik’s Urban Warfare, Samuel Stein’s Capital City, and In Defense of Housing by Peter Marcuse and David Madden—all of which situate real estate and housing through the lens of empire and racial capitalism. The book is divided in six chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Whereas other scholars have documented the discriminatory practices of the FHA and VA between 1934 and 1968, Race for Profit chronicles the postCivil Rights shift from redlining and racist exclusion towards predatory inclusion and exploitation. In the introduction, “Homeowner’s Business,” Janice Johnson is introduced as “an atypical homebuyer” in 1970s Philadelphia. As a Black single mother and welfare recipient, Johnson’s profile is emblematic of those who have been traditionally excluded by the FHA’s homeownership programs and the private real estate industry. Taylor writes that city officials condemned Johnson’s apartment and she was looking to rent elsewhere. After being denied tenancy multiple times due to her welfare status, her landlord recommended that she buy a home using a new program at HUD. Johnson’s skepticism was eased only by her lack of options. Quickly, Tayor shows