Race and Real Estate

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.

Adrienne Brown is Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago. Valerie Smith is Dean of the College and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Department of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. Kim Lane Scheppele is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University