About This Unit

Property feels like the most neutral of legal institutions: titles, deeds, taxes, appraisals. This unit examines how that machinery has worked, from the founding to the present, as an engine of racialized dispossession. The American property system was built on two foundational takings — the conquest of Native land and the conversion of enslaved people into property — and the unit's recent legal scholarship shows those origins persisting in the doctrines, valuation practices, and tax systems that still decide whose ownership is secure. Bernadette Atuahene's concept of "predatory governance" names the contemporary form: public officials raising revenue through laws and processes — inflated assessments, tax foreclosure, fines — that strip wealth from Black homeowners while remaining formally legal.

The unit pairs that legal analysis with the question of perception: how race itself came to be something appraisers, lenders, and neighbors were trained to see in property. Adrienne Brown's history of mass homeownership argues that residential discrimination was not only a policy regime but a perceptual one, teaching Americans to sense race and assign it value on the block. From the government-engineered segregation Richard Rothstein documents, through urban renewal's seizures, to the present-day undervaluation of Black-owned homes and the foreclosure machinery of "legally stolen" property, learners trace dispossession as an ongoing process with identifiable beneficiaries — and meet the communities organizing to reverse it.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain how conquest and enslavement function as foundations of American property law, and identify their doctrinal traces in the present.
• Define predatory governance and analyze a contemporary practice — tax assessment, foreclosure, fines, appraisal — through that framework.
• Describe how government policy produced racial segregation and wealth stripping in the twentieth century, distinguishing de jure action from private prejudice.
• Evaluate a dispossession case from origin to remedy, weighing what legal restitution can and cannot restore.

Keywords

• Dispossession
• Predatory governance
• Racial wealth gap
• Eminent domain
• Predatory inclusion
• Devaluation

Open Educational Resources

• Segregated by Design. Directed by Mark Lopez; written by Mark Lopez and Richard Rothstein, 2019. Watch the film.

Animated documentary short (18 min) · Open access.

An eighteen-minute animated film, narrated by Richard Rothstein and adapted from his book The Color of Law, that lays out how governments at every level segregated American metropolitan areas in the twentieth century. It catalogs the specific mechanisms — racial zoning ordinances, Federal Housing Administration underwriting that refused to insure mortgages in or near Black neighborhoods, the deliberate siting of public housing, slum clearance, and the routing of highways through Black communities — and argues that these were explicit acts of government rather than the sum of private choices. The film closes on a constitutional claim: because segregation was imposed by unconstitutional state action, government bears an obligation to remedy it. Closed-captioned and freely available, it presents the de jure argument in a compact form and introduces the question of repair that the unit returns to in its scholarship and case studies.

• Rothstein, Richard. "The Color of Law" (recorded book talk). Economic Policy Institute, 2017. Watch the talk.

Recorded lecture (video) · Open access.

A recorded lecture in which Richard Rothstein presents the argument of his book The Color of Law in his own words. He draws the distinction at the center of the book — between de facto segregation, understood as the unplanned result of private prejudice and economic forces, and de jure segregation, produced by law and public policy — and argues that American residential segregation is overwhelmingly the latter. The talk works through the catalog of explicit governmental actions that created and maintained the color line, and develops the legal logic that follows: that segregation imposed by unconstitutional state action carries a constitutional obligation of repair. For the unit, the lecture is the spoken-word companion to the film and the books, letting learners hear how an argument assembled case by case from the documentary record is built and defended.

• "Rural and Racialized." The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project, 2023. Read the essay.

Blog essay (scholarly) · Open access.

An essay from the Law and Political Economy Project that extends the analysis of racialized property beyond the city to the countryside. It examines the legal structures through which Black rural landholding collapsed over the twentieth century: discrimination in U.S. Department of Agriculture lending and programs, the vulnerabilities of land passed down without a will, and the partition sale, by which co-owned land can be forced onto the market. The essay introduces heirs' property — the fractional-ownership regime that arises when land is inherited without clear title, leaving each heir a share that can be sold to an outside party who then sues to divide the whole — which scholars identify as among the largest and least-recognized mechanisms of Black land loss. For the unit, the piece corrects an otherwise urban emphasis and connects rural dispossession to the same legal machinery operating in cities.

• Lee, Robert, and Tristan Ahtone. "Land-Grab Universities." High Country News, 2020. Explore the investigation.

Investigative feature with interactive database · Open access.

An investigative project by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, published in High Country News, that traces how the United States financed its public university system with expropriated Indigenous land. Under the Morrill Act of 1862, the federal government granted states land — nearly eleven million acres taken from close to 250 Indigenous nations through treaties and seizures — whose sale endowed the land-grant colleges. The project reconstructs this transfer parcel by parcel and cession by cession, and pairs the reporting with a searchable database linking specific universities to the specific lands and nations that funded them. For the unit, it gives the conquest foundation a concrete and documentable form, and offers learners a research tool they can query directly. It also models what a reparative accounting looks like when the underlying records are actually assembled rather than assumed lost.

Key Scholarship

• Atuahene, Bernadette. Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. New York: Little, Brown, 2025. Publisher page.

Book.

Atuahene, a property-law scholar, moved to Detroit to study squatting and instead found her neighbors losing long-held homes to property-tax foreclosure driven by illegally inflated assessments. From that case she develops the concept of predatory governance: the practice by which public officials raise revenue through laws and processes — over-assessment, tax foreclosure, fines and fees — that produce or sustain racial inequity while remaining formally legal. Following two families descended from a Black and a white grandfather who both arrived in early-twentieth-century Detroit, the book shows how the same city produced divergent fates through its tax and property systems, and argues that what happened in Detroit is a national pattern rather than a local aberration. Combining ethnography, legal analysis, and narrative, it closes on the question of remedy — what compensation and reform would actually repair the harm — which carries directly into the unit's case study on Detroit.

• Kahrl, Andrew W. The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Publisher page.

Book.

Kahrl, a historian, traces how the American property-tax system has extracted wealth from Black households from Reconstruction to the present. He documents a recurring pattern: Black-owned property over-assessed relative to its value, Black taxpayers charged for public services they did not receive, and tax debt converted into a mechanism of land loss through liens and forced sales. Telling this history through the experience of Black Americans as taxpayers — and through their organized efforts to win fairer assessment and more equitable public spending — the book treats taxation not as a neutral administrative function but as a site where racial inequality was manufactured and maintained. For the unit, Kahrl supplies the long historical depth beneath Atuahene's contemporary account of predatory governance, showing that revenue extraction through the tax system is not a recent distortion but a durable feature of how property and race have been bound together in the United States.

• Brown, Adrienne. The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. Publisher page.

Book.

Brown reverses the usual question about race and housing: not how race shaped homeownership, but how the spread of mass homeownership reshaped race itself. Reading appraisal manuals and real-estate-industry archives alongside twentieth-century literature — Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison — she argues that redlining and related practices were perceptual regimes as much as policy ones: they trained bureaucrats, appraisers, and ordinary homeowners to perceive race in a block and to attach financial value to that perception. On this account, residential discrimination did not only determine where people could live; it helped fix what race was taken to be and what it was worth. For the unit, Brown supplies its most distinctive claim — that the property system is also a way of teaching people to see — and connects the legal and economic history of housing to the everyday habits of perception through which race is read off neighborhoods, listings, and "good schools."

• Park, K-Sue. "The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field." Yale Law Journal 131 (2022): 1062–1153. Read the article.

Law review article · Open access.

Park argues that conquest and enslavement were not unfortunate background conditions for American property law but its generative core. The instruments that define modern property — the mortgage, the system for recording title, foundational doctrines of ownership and transfer — developed through the taking of Native land and the buying and selling of enslaved people. Drawing on legal history, she shows further that the standard property-law curriculum was assembled in ways that screened these origins out of view, so that the field came to present its categories as neutral and timeless. The article's claim is therefore double: that the violence of dispossession is built into ordinary property doctrine, and that forgetting this was itself an achievement of legal education and scholarship. For the unit, Park supplies the deep historical foundation and draws together the Indigenous and Black threads of dispossession that the other readings document separately, showing them as two expressions of a single legal formation.

• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Taylor examines what followed the era of redlining, after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 formally opened mortgage credit to Black buyers. She terms the new arrangement predatory inclusion: rather than ending exclusion, the real estate and banking industries — working in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development — found profit in bringing Black buyers into the housing market on exploitative terms, selling them substandard homes with federally backed mortgages under a business model in which foreclosure was an expected, even desired, outcome. The book unsettles the assumption that access to ownership is the opposite of dispossession: here, inclusion itself becomes the mechanism of extraction. For the unit, Taylor extends the story past explicit exclusion into the present, and gives learners a pattern — profit drawn from the inclusion of the previously excluded — that recurs in later subprime lending and in other markets where access is sold at a premium to those long shut out.

• Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Rothstein assembles the documentary case that American residential segregation was de jure — produced by explicit and often unconstitutional action at every level of government — rather than de facto, the incidental result of private choices. He catalogs the mechanisms in detail: Federal Housing Administration underwriting manuals that required and rewarded segregation, public housing deliberately sited to separate the races, racially restrictive covenants enforced by the courts, and urban renewal and highway programs that targeted Black neighborhoods. From this record he draws a constitutional argument: because segregation was imposed by government in violation of the Constitution, government carries an affirmative obligation to remedy it. For the unit, Rothstein is the evidentiary backbone of the twentieth-century story, and his insistence on the de facto / de jure distinction sets up a question the unit pursues throughout — what kinds of repair become possible, and required, once a harm is shown to be the state's own work rather than the residue of private prejudice.

Case Studies

• Returning Bruce's Beach: Dispossession and Its Remedies

California eminent-domain seizure (1924) and 2021–2022 return; Los Angeles County materials and documentary · Case-analysis activity.

A case-analysis activity tracing a single dispossession from taking to remedy: Manhattan Beach, California's 1924 use of eminent domain to seize the beachfront resort that Willa and Charles Bruce had built for Black beachgoers, and Los Angeles County's 2021–2022 return of the land to their descendants. Learners reconstruct the seizure, the return, and the aftermath — including the descendants' decision to sell the land back to the county — and weigh what legal restitution can and cannot restore.

• Predatory Governance in Detroit: The Property Tax Foreclosure Crisis

Detroit's property-tax foreclosure crisis and the Coalition for Property Tax Justice; built on Atuahene's research · Policy-analysis activity.

A policy-analysis activity built on Atuahene's research into Detroit's tax-foreclosure crisis, in which tens of thousands of homes were lost to foreclosures driven by assessments that violated Michigan's own constitutional cap. Learners trace the mechanism step by step — over-assessment, unpayable bills, foreclosure, auction — identify who profits at each stage, and assess the remedies sought by the Coalition for Property Tax Justice's organizing campaign for compensation.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Park: If the mortgage and the land-recording system were developed through conquest and slavery, what follows for how we should understand "neutral" property law today? Identify one ordinary property practice and trace what its history adds to your evaluation of it.
2. On Rothstein: Rothstein insists the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation matters enormously. Explain why — what changes, legally and morally, when segregation is shown to be government's work? What remedy logic does the showing unlock?
3. On Taylor: "Predatory inclusion" claims that access to ownership can itself be the mechanism of extraction. Apply the concept to one setting beyond 1970s housing — subprime mortgages, for-profit colleges, auto lending, rent-to-own — and assess how well it travels.
4. On Atuahene: Predatory governance describes governments profiting from racialized extraction through formally legal means. What makes this harder to contest than private discrimination? Who are the "well-meaning people" her account says become complicit, and how?
5. On Brown: Brown argues Americans were taught to perceive race through property — to see like an appraiser. Where do you see that training operating now (listings language, "good neighborhood" talk, school-rating maps)? Can a perceptual regime be unlearned, and what would it take?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit presents dispossession as a continuous process rather than a sequence of separate episodes — from the conquest and slavery Park places at property law's foundation, through the government segregation Rothstein documents and the predatory inclusion Taylor describes, to the tax extraction Kahrl traces across 150 years and the predatory governance Atuahene finds in Detroit today. Drawing on at least two readings from different periods, make the case that these are expressions of one mechanism rather than unrelated wrongs, and identify what stays the same across them. Then turn to remedy: given the dispossession-to-remedy arc the unit's case studies follow, what would meaningful repair require, and what does your analysis suggest it cannot reach?

Further Readings and Resources

• Immergluck, Dan. Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. Publisher page.

Book.

A city-scale study of contemporary Atlanta arguing that dispossession in the twenty-first century works through investment as well as disinvestment. Immergluck traces how speculation, redevelopment, and rising land values displace Black and low-income residents — a dynamic distinct from the redlining and abandonment of earlier decades but continuous with them in effect. The book extends the unit's story into the present-day city, where capital flowing in, not only fleeing out, becomes a mechanism of removal.

• Francis, Hamilton, Mitchell, et al. "Black Land Loss: 1920–1997." Read the paper.

Working paper.

A quantitative study estimating the scale of Black agricultural land loss across the twentieth century, putting figures to the acreage and the accumulated wealth that Black families were stripped of between 1920 and 1997. The paper supplies the numbers behind the unit's rural thread, giving empirical weight to the legal mechanisms — discriminatory lending, partition sale, and heirs'-property vulnerability — through which that land was lost.

• Atuahene, Bernadette. "Predatory Cities." California Law Review 108 (2020): 107–182. Read the article.

Law review article · Open access.

The law-review article in which Atuahene first develops the predatory-cities argument later expanded in her book, presenting the Detroit property-tax data in full. She documents assessments that violated Michigan's constitutional cap and the foreclosures that followed, and theorizes the practice as a distinct form of racialized state extraction. For learners who want the scholarly apparatus and the data behind the unit's anchor account, this is the academic companion to the book.

• Saunt, Claudio. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020. Publisher page.

Book.

A history of Indian Removal in the 1830s that treats it as a vast, state-organized transfer of property — the forced expulsion of Native nations from their homelands and the conversion of that land into a marketable asset for white settlement. Saunt reconstructs the administrative machinery of dispossession in detail, showing removal as deliberate federal policy rather than inevitable expansion, and deepens the conquest foundation the unit builds on.

• Perry, Andre M., Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger. "The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods." Brookings Institution, 2018. Read the report.

Research report · Open access.

A Brookings study quantifying the appraisal gap: homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are valued, on average, tens of thousands of dollars below comparable homes elsewhere — the report estimates an average undervaluation of roughly $48,000 per home, amounting to enormous aggregate lost wealth. The study provides an empirical floor under the unit's perceptual argument, measuring in dollars the value that the habit of seeing race in a neighborhood subtracts from Black-owned property.

• Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707–1791. Read the article.

Law review article.

The foundational statement that whiteness itself operates as a form of legally protected property — a set of expectations and entitlements, built through slavery and conquest, that the law recognizes and defends even after the formal rules creating them are gone. Harris's argument is the theoretical companion to Park's history, naming the property interest that ordinary doctrine quietly protects and showing how racial advantage was secured in the very form of property rights.

• "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America." Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond. Explore the archive.

Interactive archive.

An interactive archive that digitizes the residential security maps produced by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in the 1930s for more than two hundred American cities — the color-coded maps, with their red-lined "hazardous" zones, that gave redlining its name. Users can zoom to a city, read the original area descriptions that justified each grade, and see how federal grading mapped onto race. It is the primary-source infrastructure beneath the unit's twentieth-century story.

• Native Land Digital. Native-Land.ca (interactive map). Open the map.

Interactive map.

A community-maintained interactive map of Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the Americas and beyond. Entering a location returns the nations whose lands it sits on, the treaties that cover it, and the languages spoken there. For the unit, it is an orientation tool for the conquest thread — a way to connect any specific place to the dispossession that made its current ownership possible — and a resource for land-acknowledgment practice.