Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers a damning chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure.

Taylor narrates this dramatic transformation in housing policy, its financial ramifications, and its influence on African Americans. She reveals that federal policy transformed the urban core into a new frontier of cynical extraction disguised as investment.

About the Author
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of From BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Reviews
"What's the last great book you read?"
"I can't just name one. I want to highlight three great books I recently read on America's political economy. The first, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is an expertly told history of the post-civil rights emergence of what Taylor terms "predatory inclusion". The second, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, is the best booklong case for reparations. The third, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, by Walter Johnson, adroitly examines a U.S. history of imperial racial capitalism with its crosswinds centered in St. Louis." - Dr. Ibram Kendi, New York Times, March 20201


Awards
Commended for Pulitzer Prize (History) 2020. Short-listed for National Book Awards (Nonfiction) 2019.



Book Information
ISBN 9781469653662
Author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Format Hardback
Page Count 368
Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press
Weight(grams) 650g