Urbanizing Racial Capitalism: Anti-Black Housing Policies and the Making of Perpetual Urban Crisis

Keywords: Anti-Blackness, Racial Capitalism, Rant Gap, Redlining, Urban Crisis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 39

Abstract

In this paper I argue that anti-Black racism needs to be understood as constitutive of urban crises in the United States. Critical geographers have engaged the political economy and neoliberal housing policies that provoked the most recent housing crisis, which has disproportionately impacted Black people. Undertheorized, however, are the anti-Black dimensions of the rent gap, which I argue have been central to American urban political economy and an essential feature of capital accumulation in urban land markets. I engage the analytical framework of racial capitalism to demonstrate how anti-Black housing policies and practices systematically produce devalorization and revalorization in the built environment. I examine notable historical housing policies and practices such as redlining to show how they conflated economic risk with Blackness to justify large-scale disinvestment in Black urban spaces between the 1930s and 1960s. I argue Black resistance to anti-Black racism helped to orchestrate key policy changes during the late 1960s helped to alter the movement of capital which in turn transformed Black spaces from bad risk and beyond the pale of investment, to high-risk but with the potential of exceptionally high returns. I trace this history to demonstrate how the recent crisis is contingent on transformed relationships between race, risk, and urban land. I close with reflections on the foreclosure crisis as a rallying point for activists and researchers to abandon calls for further “inclusion” and to shift paths towards the creation of decommodified forms of housing.