(2019) - Race for Profit - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
In Race for Profit (2019), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor traces how federal housing reforms of the late 1960s and 1970s opened homeownership to Black families — and how the same real estate and banking industries that had long profited from excluding Black buyers simply pivoted to profiting from including them instead, through predatory loans, inflated appraisals, and properties engineered to fail. Taylor calls this "predatory inclusion": access granted as a new market to extract from. It draws attention not just to who gets left out of a system, but to how being let in can be its own kind of harm, when the terms of entry are designed by the same interests that built the exclusion. If a system can profit equally from keeping people out and from letting them in, what does it mean to measure progress by access alone — and whose interests does "inclusion" actually serve when it's the system's beneficiaries who get to define what inclusion looks like?
The premise of racial liberalism, and postwar liberalism in general, was that the systems and institutions of the country were strong enough to bestow the political, economic, and social riches of American society onto all who were willing to work hard and commit themselves to a better future.