In a previous piece reviewing another book on white supremacy, white conservative backlash to social welfare, and public health in the United States I remarked that “in the long run, the white wage is negative”. I would like to add “in the short run, however, the white wage is extremely profitable to white people and inexorability damaging to black people”. Keeanga-Yamathtta Taylor’s “Race for Profit” is a relatively short (it runs about 260~ pages) but incredibly dense book on how the U.S. Federal government colluded with the private real estate industry, the private lending banks, and the mortgage banks to rob black people of a national promise to make available adequate housing for the nations poor. A significant portion of the book is about how the Federal government of the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, were so ideological committed to the ideology of capitalism they were unable to recognize that it was capitalism itself, with support from local and national government, that invented and sustained residential apartheid in the United States. These men and their administrations could not understand how expensive it is to be poor.
“Representatives of the Nixon administration, including George Romney [head of HUD], portrayed the collapse of FHA-assisted low-income homeownership as an indictment of “big government”. These observations were hardly benign; they were spun into a larger campaign intended to undermine the system of urban social welfare that had been built over the course of the 1960s as a result of the convergence of the civil rights and Black insurgent movements.
This campaign was not just an attack on black working-class families; it was part of larger effort to undermine the central premise of twentieth-century governance: the social contract. The expectation that the federal government had a responsibility to create a floor through which no citizen could fall was forged through mass protests in the 1930s and again in the 1960s. In the absence of that pressure and of the postwar economic expansion that made it possible, the ruling elite repositioned itself to restore lower expectations and lower living standards.”
After Reagan became president in 1980 he and his administration reinforced the central failure of the HUD act and the federal governments programs to provide housing for low income Americans. That central failing was the federal government’s reliance and trust of the private capitalist system. In tasking the federal government to retreat from its active role in encouraging private mortgage banks, lending banks, and real estate companies to invest in poor working-class black communities and individuals Reagan stated the “genius of the market economy, freed from the distortions forced by government housing policies and regulations that swing erratically from loving to hostile, can provide for housing far better than Federal programs”. Reagan, like Nixon and Johnson, failed to understand that the private economy was structurally racist against black people and that government policy of refusing to enforce its own equal protection i.e. the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act exacerbated racism in the private economy. Nixon and other conservatives rewrote white suburban and white real estate workers racist hostility to black families as economic choice not segregation as a matter of policy. Nixon and other conservatives, as well as many liberals, failed to appreciate the complex system of economic and social racism that keeps black people as permanent underclass. Poor people are poor because they are unable to accrue wealth. Outside of specific conditions of the economy such as deindustrialization of many Western economics starting in the 1970s, poor people are unable to accrue wealth because they unable and denied the opportunity for well paying jobs. This more true generally for black Americans who have higher unemployment rates than whites and are denied the protection from the criminal-legal system, denied access to credit, and due to institutional racism denied access to generational wealth. Black people are kept as a permanent underclass due to cyclical system of the same racist capitalist system that Nixon and others instructed would provide them with adequate homes. This ostracizing of black homeowners into majority black neighborhoods keep black families from growing their wealth since home value is largest source of generational wealth in the U.S.
“As a result, to this present moment, homes owned by African Americans are worth less than homes owned by white people. Black majority neighborhoods are still viewed less favorably than white majority neighborhoods. indeed the distance from Black communities continues to factor into the superior value of white neighborhoods. Segregating African Americans into deteriorating urban neighborhoods while simultaneously denying those communities access to resources that could be used toward development created as an economic disadvantage for black people that was impossible to overcome”. pp. 260
Thus, white supremacy, as matter of government policy secures for white people wealth by positing blackness as negative. White homes and thus white wealth is artificially inflated because a racist real estate industry and racist government establishes a positive value to whiteness.
The 2008 Wall Street financial crises was difficult for all working-class people but it was absolutely abysmal for black American homeowners. To this day black Americans are fighting for fair housing and fighting their own government to honor its own laws.
An Oversimplification of Time and Space 