Race and Real Estate (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities) - Hardcover

"I strongly recommend Race and Real Estate to everyone interested in the topic, particularly those who feel they already know a lot about these topics. This is a difficult book to summarize because it is so rich. For me, each chapter offered new insights and new information on familiar topics and generally challenged some of my long-held understandings related to issues of race and real estate. It is a must read." --Nancy Denton, Contemporary Sociology "Race and Real Estate is a ground-breaking, richly complex collection. The sustained, unflinching exploration of certain motifs holds familiar topics up to fresh perspectives, offering insight into narratives of home ownership, belonging, neighborhood, segregation, place and space, planning and urban renewal, law and policy, property, and the long inheritance of slavery and colonialism. Sparks fly from these essays. The book invites new thinking about this powerful topic, pushing readers to revisit history and find inspiration for building a better future." --Alison Isenberg, Professor of History, Princeton University, and author of Downtown America "Provocative and innovative treatment of real estate's racialized past and present, with lessons for the future. Interdisciplinary work at its best." --Barbara D. Savage, Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania "The essays in Race and Real Estate--from leading scholars in law, sociology, history, American studies, and literature--offer a bracing, complex, and compelling examination of race and property in America. The compilation presents us with a great deal to admire. Equally important, Race and Real Estate provides us with a great deal to ponder, question, and question again." --Bennett Capers, Stanley A. August Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.