Racial Capitalism and the Social Violence of Extraction: A Review of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
In the 1960s, an African American majority began to emerge in many northern industrial cities in the United States, resulting in part from the mass migration of Black southerners to the north in pursuit of higher wages and in part from the flight of white urbanites to the suburbs in the face of racial tensions. By 1965, Washington, DC, and Newark, New Jersey, boasted Black majorities, with Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Philadelphia soon to follow. Leading civil rights activists Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs saw this emerging Black majority as a new opportunity for building social movements. Despite being continuously excluded from the formal political and economic structures of the city, the Boggses identified urban African Americans as perhaps the strongest political and economic force in the country. The Boggses argued that the primary mechanism of containment deployed to limit Black political power—that is, the restriction of Black Americans to the substandard living conditions of the “black ghetto”—could, in their eyes, serve as a source for collective organizing. Yet, as noted in their 1965 founding statement for the Organization for Black Power, the problems of the black ghetto—segregation, economic isolation, and poor housing, among others—had to be addressed differently than Jim Crow in the South because the racism structuring Black life in the North was “based not upon legal (de jure) contradictions but upon systematic (de facto) contradictions.”
These “systematic de facto contradictions” serve as the basis for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. More than simply surveying the myriad ways racism pervaded inner-city housing, Race for Profit examines the “critical turn” away from the exclusionary practices of redlining that defined African American access to housing from the 1930s through the 1960s and toward the seemingly inclusionary practices of the 1970s that centered on encouraging homeownership for low-income African Americans. While this turn has been explained as part of the affirmative liberal response to civil rights demands, Taylor instead frames the policy shift as a form of “predatory inclusion,” one that granted African Americans access to the real estate market but on the basis of continued exploitation. Black Americans were sold substandard, dilapidated housing at inflated costs with exorbitant fees, all of which made it impossible for them to reap the promised economic benefits of homeownership. “In the strange mathematics of racial real estate,” Taylor writes, “Black people paid more for the inferior condition of their housing.” This “race tax” meant that while homeownership served as a primary means of building wealth for whites, it served as a means for extracting wealth from Black communities. The predatory real estate practices and homeownership initiatives detailed in Race for Profit demonstrate that the convergence of Blackness and urbanization that the Boggses identified as a new base of political power was possible precisely because it constituted a base of economic value—the growing urban Black majority was a prime source of capitalist extraction.