Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor wrote the book race for profit, whose focus was on discrimination and greed policies by the cooperate world in history. This book focuses on how black people who owned homes were looked down upon by the industry of real estate and banks. Taylor’s story began after World War II when governments began to succeed while they enlarged homeownership. The policies that the government put across were to favor people who could afford to purchase houses that were already built. Several black families could afford, but even though they afforded, they would face discrimination by realtors.
One of the major themes highlighted by Keeanga Taylor in the Race for Profits is that of racial capitalism. She says that the governments’ incentives and real estate exploitation created a platform for racial discrimination and segregation, which was, in general, termed as racial capitalism (Botein, 2019). With data collected from interviews, covering media complaints, testimonies, and reports from the congregation, the book pushes the argument of housing deco modification as the only solution for the housing crisis. The Race for Profits book lowered the urban crisis narrative while the black inner-city lowered housing.
Keeanga reveals that the majority of the African-American’s dream of owning a home did not come as a result of a dream being fulfilled, but rather, she narrates the nightmare of racial capitalism. Her story appears to be very important because it brings an understanding of how discrimination of the African-Americans has risen due to direct policies. In addition to that, African-Americans have been devastated due to the predation of mechanisms of finance. An example is given by President Andrew Jackson, who from the Southern tribes possessed eleven million acres of land that passed onto white settler’s land. A trail of tears was sent by the tribal people to banish them from Oklahoma.
Keeanga’s main argument in her book, Race for Profit, was how the black community in the United States was undermined due to owning homes and bits of advice on how housing conditions can be improved. This can, in short, be viewed as racism and discrimination. She goes ahead to say that the discrimination and the horrible state in which the black people live is not as a result of a crisis in the public-private partnership but rather in its foundation (Arjini, 2019). This is because these problems go on even after the legal segregation was banished.
The author, Keeanga Taylor, argues that she cannot term the housing crisis as a setback since it has been active for the past one hundred years but rather terms it as housing under capitalism. Being that every person experiences it, she states that it’s insecure and unstable. It has been difficult to solve the issues of housing in terms of privacy due to political fixation. When one ends up in a population where people cannot be housed fully, the federal government resists with the housing of the public (Arjini, 2019). When the government leaves the market to decide on pricing, they will go up beyond humans’ possibility.
Even with the introduction of the Fair Housing act in 1968, African-Americans have not seized having experience in housing inequality. In 2020, it was reported by the Bureau of the census that forty-four percent of black people and those of the colored race owned homes (Williams, 2020). With the largest percentage of homeownership being of the whites. Reports have been published that the ownership of homes has been equalized by race, and this has led to the reduction of the gap in racial wealth. People of color are believed to take debts to buy homes that are not expensive as compared to whites.
According to Keeanga Taylor, the model of private-public partnership is designed to fail. She mentions incompatibility, which explains the affordability of housing and industries driven by profit. In addition to that, she talks about the importance of all these aspects: it lies in safety and how affordable housing can be. The book further explains how the housing and urban development act failed, in that the black Americans could not access the purchasing of a home, which led to their inability to join the middle school that was popular after World War II.
In the early 20th century, the industries driven by profit focused on program goals that drew clear lines to the mortgage crises. The federal housing administration was able to give out its policies and mortgages but did not loan money. However, in 1967, there was an uprising in Detroit; that is, life insurance companies numbered at three hundred (Taylor, 2019). This was the largest number of companies in the United States to have a mortgage pool that was worth two billion dollars that helped in the financing of single families and small businesses owned by the people of color. Moreover, they funded apartments and family units that were quite a number but on two conditions. One was that FHA had to ensure all the mortgages to sideline risks that could have come in the insurance companies.
The second condition was that all the loans were to only be available in areas that were redlined. This meant that one could take a loan and not travel to the outskirts with is or rather to facilities that were deemed better in public. However, one could take a loan and go with it to quarantined areas. Since HUD went against its anti-discrimination policies, it was against the federal government’s law to support the leons. Therefore, they allowed private corporations to make decisions while they backed down and let go of the rules. Taylor closes by saying that the people of color stand at a disadvantage in this sector since American’s main way of wealth accumulation over the years is through home ownership (Williams, 2020). She continues to reveal how the repeat of homeownership extension by people of color confirms the racist assumptions on their success. She speaks of the need to explore the need for more addresses on the dispossession history of the African-Americans by rigorous scholarship on the access of homeownership by the people of color in the United States.