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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor presents "Race for Profit How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership"

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Saturday, November 2nd 2019

2:00 pm

The Radical Bookfair Pavilion at the Baltimore Book Festival

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit—longlisted for the National Book Award!—uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining’s end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation’s first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of From BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective."Race for Profit powerfully disrupts a standard story about racism--that it depends on discriminatory exclusion--and introduces readers to 'predatory inclusion,' an analytical gift for students of social history. Through impressive research and vivid storytelling, Taylor offers an unflinching examination of the mythology that has sustained the American dream, ultimately revealing that, for many African Americans, homeownership hasn’t resulted in the fulfillment of a dream but instead has been a nightmare--a horror story of racial capitalism."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow“In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor makes an enormous contribution to the collective understanding of the methods and mechanics of racial capitalism, revealing how the real estate industry’s long history of discrimination against African Americans has adapted from explicit policies of racist exclusion to equally devastating predatory financial mechanisms. Drawing on deep archival research, Taylor’s lucid and incisive book explains why we cannot look to the private sector for solutions, but instead need a radically different approach to housing based on the right to a dignified life for all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

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