bwaber reviewed Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
A Focused, Incisive Look at a Pivotal Moment in Black Homeownership
4 stars
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor digs into a tumultuous ~4 year period in US residential real estate - 1968 to 1972, showing how the promise of the Civil Rights and Great Society era became compromised and then thoroughly reversed by Richard Nixon and George Romney through mismanagement and eventually active sabotage. The tragedy is in how close the US came to making real progress on segregation, only to see it disintegrate and the explicitly racist language of the pre-civil rights era morph into coded terms but with the same effect.
By combining harrowing individual stories with macro statistics, Taylor conveys the costs of this failure on society. Whether it's mental and physical health, education, wealth, or economic opportunity, this era is littered with systemic oppression and sets the stage for the decades that follow. My one minor gripe is that I wish the title of the book was clearer about its time period …
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor digs into a tumultuous ~4 year period in US residential real estate - 1968 to 1972, showing how the promise of the Civil Rights and Great Society era became compromised and then thoroughly reversed by Richard Nixon and George Romney through mismanagement and eventually active sabotage. The tragedy is in how close the US came to making real progress on segregation, only to see it disintegrate and the explicitly racist language of the pre-civil rights era morph into coded terms but with the same effect.
By combining harrowing individual stories with macro statistics, Taylor conveys the costs of this failure on society. Whether it's mental and physical health, education, wealth, or economic opportunity, this era is littered with systemic oppression and sets the stage for the decades that follow. My one minor gripe is that I wish the title of the book was clearer about its time period focus.
Overall this book powerfully lays out the roots of many systems that have endured and expanded throughout the US to the modern day, not just in housing but also in affirmative action programs more broadly. Given the recent Supreme Court decision, one can only hope that future generations will take the lessons of this book to heart.
