This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters at patreon.com and by University of North Carolina Press,

which has loads of great titles perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is race for profit, how banks and the real estate industry undermine black homeownership by

Kiena Yamada Taylor, a frequent guest right here on the dig. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,

a wave of urban uprisings pushed politicians to bring about an end to 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 in the real estate industry to treat black

homebuyers equally. What ensued was a bonanza of racist corruption at the expense of black

home buyers. The racist exclusion of redlining had been transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory

inclusion. Race for profit uncovers how exploitative

real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned, and new policies meant to

encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit black homeowners. By the end of the

1970s, the push to uplift black homeownership had descended into a gold mine for realtors and

mortgage lenders, called by Michelle Alexander, a horror story of racial capitalism, and long-listed for the National Book Award,

race for profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Race for profit, how banks in the real estate industry undermined black homeownership by Keanga Yamada Taylor.

Out now from University of North Carolina Press.

Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

The world as we know it wasn't inevitable, but it does often seem that way.

And that normalcy is dangerous because it makes the current imbalances of power

...