Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Mar 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Janina Edwards

About this audiobook

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

About the author

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, the Guardian, Ms., and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the African American studies department at Princeton University.

Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, as well as a finalist for the Audie Award. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin.