Book Review: PLUNDERED: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America

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From the moment Black people arrived on what would become United States soil, governmental policies rooted in race have impacted our lives.

Bernadette Atuahene, a professor of law at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, writes about what she terms a practice of “predatory governance” in her new book, “Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America.” Predatory governance, Atuahene says, is “when local governments intentionally or unintentionally raise public dollars through racist policies.”

Her book examines how inherited wealth shapes lives in the U.S., and how that wealth can be curtailed by policies like predatory governance. Atuahene tells the story of a Black family and the home they inherited from a grandfather who started out as a sharecropper but came to Detroit, Michigan, and was able to get work in the automobile industry. That same industry, at around the same time, employed an immigrant white Italian man who was also able to purchase a home for his family because of his work in the automobile industry.

Because the Italian man was accepted as white, he was able to earn more income than the Black former sharecropper. And, because of his skin color, the Italian immigrant was able to move his family to the newer homes being built in Detroit’s suburbs. His children were able to attend better schools, and he was soon able to switch to a job in a newly constructed automobile factory in the suburbs.

Government redlining, exclusionary zoning in the suburbs, and disinvestment in predominantly Black cities like Detroit condemned residents to live in properties that depreciated in value and ultimately eroded any gains in generational wealth.

The grandson of the Italian immigrant still lives in the home his family purchased in 1976 for $28,000. With years of upgrades, that home is now worth $250,000. The granddaughter of the Black sharecropper inherited a home in Detroit, where home values have plummeted. Her family home was valued at less than $10,000, yet the city was taxing the property based on a higher home value estimation. When Detroit homeowners could not pay those taxes, they, like the granddaughter of the sharecropper, lost their homes to foreclosure.

“The federal government has never taken responsibility for the fact that, by cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods through redlining, it manufactured the blight that its urban renewal programs sought to erase,” Atuahene writes in her book: “This seemingly righteous work of eradicating blight had unholy consequences because razed alongside the ‘blight’ were also long-accumulated social capital and ‘unblighted’ residences. Gone, too, were the productive enterprises and vibrant cultural spaces –– such as the jazz and blues clubs, barbershops, and grocery stores.”

Dr. Atuahene was in New York City last week to participate in a discussion about her book with New York State Senator Cordell Cleare. She spoke at an NYU Law School event on Thursday, March 20, sponsored by New York University’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and Fordham University’s Center on Race, Law and Justice.

The professor is using the promotion of her book as a means of raising awareness about two groups she is collaborating with to confront issues highlighted in her work. Atuahene works with the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, a collection of grassroots organizations that helps homeowners in Detroit get home evaluations that ensure that they are fairly taxed. She also helped form the Dignity Restoration Project (DRP), which is trying to raise $10 million to help compensate Detroit homeowners who lost their homes. DRP funds would go to the homeowners who were hit the hardest –– meaning people who were subjected to unregulated property taxes and had their homes foreclosed on. “The idea is if we can’t get it right in Detroit, where the theft was so recent, then the whole reparations movement is in peril,” says Atuahene. “You know, the question [about establishing reparations for the Black community] is what do you think we should start with, Jim Crow? And we’re saying, let’s start with yesterday. If we can’t get yesterday right when this whole project is in peril.”