Professor and scholar-activist Bernadette Atuahene’s meticulous research and riveting writing in Plundered reflect decades of living in communities resisting predatory governance. Over ten years after Professor Atuahene’s powerful first book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, she turns a spotlight on a Detroit community under siege from its own county. In her heartbreaking exposé of illegal property tax assessments and foreclosures, Professor Atuahene paints a vivid picture of people fighting for the right to keep the homes that rightfully belong to them.
Focused on two families – one Black and one Italian – Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America shows how government decisions circumscribe the ability to build wealth through generations. The narrative is rife with details that each deserve a book in themselves. Ms. Mae, who Plundered introduces in its opening pages, put up with years of abuse before finally shooting her husband. “He came home and tried to jump on me. I was sitting there watching tv, and he pulled his shotgun to shoot me, and so I got it, and I shot him.” To pay her defense lawyer, Ms. Mae took out a lien on her home. She finally got rid of the lien ten years later but her luck was short-lived. Soon after relieving herself of the debt, she damaged her shoulder while lifting a resident at the nursing home where she worked. Surgery could not fully restore proper use of her shoulder. Then, holes in the roof of her house caused leaks in the kitchen ceilings which made the basement ceiling fall in, unleashing a flood. While trying to drain her flooded basement, Ms. Mae fell, permanently injuring her spine and bringing her working life to an abrupt halt. The flood also destroyed her hot water tank, forcing her to boil water for everything. Instead of coming to her aid, the system repeatedly failed Ms. Mae and families like hers and then turned around and blamed them for their troubles.
Exposing not just the laws and policies that allow the government to profit from improper property tax foreclosures but also the myths that sustain these illegal practices, Plundered tells a universal story. It elegantly lays out how enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, racially restrictive covenants, school segregation, and selective policing constricted Black people’s opportunities. Detroit’s exploitation of racist policies and stereotypes allowed the Wayne County to profit from foreclosures while causing massive displacement and trauma in Black communities. Two men, Grandpa Brown, who was Black, and Grandpa Bucci, who was white and Italian, started working in Detroit’s auto industry at the same time but ended up with vastly different financial legacies.
Despite the wide reach of this injustice, few people even know it exists. In Professor Atuahene’s words, “Cell phone videos and police body cameras have captured state violence and galvanized the public into long-overdue demands for change. But there is no easy way to convey the devastation that occurs when public officials replenish public accounts through racist policies. And yet predatory governance systematically cripples Black people like Mr. Karl, the Vietnam veteran who lost his family home for failure to pay property taxes that he should not have owed in the first place.” (P. 299.) Plundered is a must-read for anyone seeking insights into how structural racism and racist tropes allow even those who have pledged to protect us to profit from injustice. The book concludes with a call for the reader to join the movement against racialized tax administration spearheaded by the Institute for Law & Organizing, offering an avenue to advocacy, community, and hope.
Editor’s note: The title of this Jot changed from ‘Predatory Governance in Detroit and Beyond’ after publication; we also made conforming changes to the text.
