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It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

And since it's Black History Month, we'll look at a major issue at the root of our racial wealth gap today.

It's the first of several hundred years of 100 things. Black

History Month segments will be doing this month. Today, it's thing number 65, housing inequality.

Our guest today is Bernadette Atuhane. She is property rights scholar and professor at USC's

Gould School of Law. She also leads the grassroots Coalition for Property

Tax Justice and the Black Homes Matter campaign and joins us today to discuss her new book.

She's got a brand new book, Plundered How Racist Policies Undermined Black Home Ownership in America.

And in it, she retells the story of two different families,

and we'll invite your personal stories as well to contribute your oral histories here as we do

in these segments. Two different families in Michigan in this book, one black, the other Italian,

both with roots in sharecropping. Through these personal accounts, we learn how housing policies like zoning ordinances,

redlining, and what she calls predatory governance resulted in generational wealth for one family

and poverty for the other.

Professor Atuhahenai, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC and our

100 Years of 100 Think series. Brian, thank you for having me. And let's begin where the stories

of your subjects begin more than 100 years ago, 160 years ago, after slavery was abolished in the United States, many newly

freed enslaved people became sharecroppers, sometimes even on the same land they used to work

when they were enslaved. What was this practice and when did it end in this country and how is it

relevant to the story you're telling?

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