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Plundered

How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America

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By Bernadette Atuahene

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On Sale
Jan 28, 2025
Page Count
384 pages
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13
9780316572217

In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the story of two grandfathers—one white, one black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain. 

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.
 
Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.
 
In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. By following the lives of two Detroit grandfathers—one Black the other white—and their grandchildren, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.

Genre:

  • "In this important and timely book, one of the world’s leading experts on property rights brings to light a secret hidden in plain sight; the bureaucratic machinery that maintains and widens the racial wealth gap in our country. Bernadette Atuahene tells this story across generations, following the descendants of two sharecroppers who settled in Detroit, one white and one black, revealing how racist tax policies fill government coffers while taking bread out of the mouths of the poor. Plundered puts flesh on the statistics and calls our attention to a problem few people knew to look for, revealing the routine nature of what Atuahene aptly calls predatory governance. I won’t think of property tax policy or the functions of government in the same way again."
    Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
  • “By telling two family stories—the Bucci’s and the Browns’—in one American city, Bernadette Atuahene puts a face on the pain of racist policies that have impoverished our democracy. Plundered is a compelling achievement of groundbreaking scholarship that you can imagine playing out on a movie screen.”
    Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, author of White Poverty and cochair of the Poor People's Campaign
  • "At a time when access to home ownership seems out of reach for so many, Plundered makes clear that this sad state of affairs is the result of a series of systemic failures—much of it aided by government policies. In clear, trenchant prose, Atuahene tells us how we got here and the remedies that are needed if we are to move forward. Plundered is a clear-eyed account of the past and a roadmap for a more equitable future."
    Melissa Murray, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Trump Indictments and Stokes Professor of Law at New York University

Formats and Prices

Price

$32.50

Price

$41.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $32.50 $41.00 CAD
  2. ebook $16.99 $21.99 CAD
  3. Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $27.99

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Bernadette Atuahene

About the Author

Bernadette Atuahene is a Harvard and Yale-trained property law scholar whose work focuses on land and homes stolen from Black people. She currently holds the Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Atuahene has served as a judicial clerk at the South African Constitutional Court, worked as a consultant for the South African Land Claims Commission, and practiced at a global law firm called Cleary Gottlieb. She is the author of We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, and she directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. Atuahene has won several accolades and has published extensively in both academic journals such as the California Law Review and NYU Law Review as well as news outlets such as the New York Times and LA Times.

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