Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership

＂Clear. Accessible. Compelling.＂ --Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers--one white, one Black--who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.

Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity--a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.

In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. Using a multigenerational narrative, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.

Bernadette Atuahene is the Frances and John Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has served as a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, practiced at a New York law firm, and worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the South African Land Claims Commission. She is the author of We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Problem. Atuahene has published extensively in academic journals such as NYU Law Review and the California Law Review. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, NPR’s Democracy Now!, and the Washington Post among others.