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A review by alexkerner
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
4.0
There is some irony that on the release day of Barack Obama's much feted memoir I finished Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's history of race and housing in the 1960s and 1970s. After all one of the most powerful criticisms of the Obama presidency was his administration's handling of the housing crisis, choosing to bailout the lenders largely responsible for the financial collapse while offering nothing to borrowers facing foreclosure of their mortgages. This facilitated the greatest destruction of wealth among African-Americans, a demographic heavily reliant on home ownership as a savings vehicle.
Taylor gives us a meticulously researched and persuasive account of how federal housing policy has largely failed African-Americans. Situating her account between the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Taylor argues that even the more liberal and aggressive attempts to reshape housing in the United States under Johnson failed to make significant strides in achieving equal access and opportunity for Black home ownership, beholden and influenced by private real estate interests whose drive for profit made them unwilling to break with racial norms to desegregate housing. The early years of the Nixon administration showed some promise under Housing Secretary George Romney to continue at least in principle aggressive attempts to desegregate housing, but reelection aspirations quickly pushed Nixon to break from these efforts to appease his base among white homeowners in the suburbs.
Taylor has produced an incredibly important history of the politics that destroyed the liberal attempts to end housing segregation and ushered in neoliberal hegemony that handed the market unfettered power to manage access to quality housing in the United States. While most lavish Obama today as he releases Promised Land, its important to not forget how his presidency continued a long line of administrations failing to address inequality in a realm so essential to American identity, home ownership
Taylor gives us a meticulously researched and persuasive account of how federal housing policy has largely failed African-Americans. Situating her account between the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Taylor argues that even the more liberal and aggressive attempts to reshape housing in the United States under Johnson failed to make significant strides in achieving equal access and opportunity for Black home ownership, beholden and influenced by private real estate interests whose drive for profit made them unwilling to break with racial norms to desegregate housing. The early years of the Nixon administration showed some promise under Housing Secretary George Romney to continue at least in principle aggressive attempts to desegregate housing, but reelection aspirations quickly pushed Nixon to break from these efforts to appease his base among white homeowners in the suburbs.
Taylor has produced an incredibly important history of the politics that destroyed the liberal attempts to end housing segregation and ushered in neoliberal hegemony that handed the market unfettered power to manage access to quality housing in the United States. While most lavish Obama today as he releases Promised Land, its important to not forget how his presidency continued a long line of administrations failing to address inequality in a realm so essential to American identity, home ownership