Property law scholar and author Bernadette Atuahene is coming to New Orleans to promote her new book at an event hosted at Baldwin and Co. on Thursday, Jan. 30.
Atuahene spoke with Verite News to explain the concepts she explores in the book “Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America.”
In the interview, Atuahene explains how racist land use policies over time put an undue burden on Black homeowners, making them more vulnerable to overtaxation and foreclosure.
While the book mainly studies Detroit, Atuahene emphasized that the problem affects cities around the country, including New Orleans. A 2022 study conducted by University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance found that the least expensive homes in Orleans Parish are taxed at a rate 1.41 times higher than the most expensive homes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Verite News: Can you give a quick rundown for our readers of what the book is about?
Bernadette Atuahene: “Plundered” is a story of two grandfathers who were once poor sharecroppers in their native lands. Both came to Detroit to work at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge factory in the early 1900s. One, Grandpa Bucci, was white and came from Italy. The other, Grandpa Brown, was Black and came from North Carolina. […] Although neither grandfather had an easy life, the book really goes through how racist policies affected the Black grandfather’s ability to pass along wealth to his grandchildren, while the Italian grandfather and his descendants were allowed to thrive.
I call these racist policies because they’re written and unwritten laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity. So racist policies exist regardless of intentions. So although “Plundered” begins with Detroit and the Ford Motor Company, it’s not just about Detroit. It’s a national story about how racist policies undermine black homeownership in America.
Atuahene goes on to explain how Myrisha Brown, granddaughter of Grandpa Brown, inherited her grandfather’s home, linking past injustices to present day inequalities.
Bernadette Atuahene: In 2008, Myrisha inherited her grandparents home, which was really dilapidated due to redlining and other racist policies that systematically deprived majority Black neighborhoods of valuable investment.
Then city officials overvalued and overtaxed the homes in Detroit, leading to historic levels of property tax foreclosure. […] One of my studies found that between 2009 and 2015, in each of these seven years, the city of Detroit [a majority Black city with lower home sale values than most of its majority-white suburban neighbors] inflated the value of 53 to 84% of its homes.
So the lowest valued homes like Myrisha’s inheritance, got hit the hardest. Wayne County [where Detroit is located] has 43 municipalities. Three have a population that is 70% or more African American — Detroit, Inkster and Highland Park — and all three have experienced illegally inflated property tax assessments and tax foreclosures at a greater rate than the 33 cities with a population that is 70% or more white.
[…] This is not just a Detroit problem. Recent research found that Blacks and Hispanics pay, on average, a 10% to 13% higher property tax rate than whites, which equals about $300 to $400 more per year. So the overpayments by Myrisha and other Black and Hispanics are quintessential examples of this idea that I created in my book called “predatory governance,”because local governments are intentionally or unintentionally raising public dollars through written and unwritten laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity.
Verite News: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Bernadette Atuahene: I want people to understand the ways in which the color of your skin affects the outcome of various families. [Grandpa Bucci and Grandpa Brown] worked at the same factory, but Grandpa Bucci could move to the suburbs where the houses were bigger, cheaper, higher quality [and] had better amenities. But Grandpa Brown couldn’t do that because of the color of his skin, because of racially [restrictive] covenants, which are covenants and deeds that prevented African-Americans from occupying certain houses. So again, they both were sharecroppers in the places of their origin, but because of the color of one’s skin, they had drastically different outcomes.
Verite News: How does learning the history of all this benefit people today?
Bernadette Atuahene: It helps us understand the role of racist policies in outcomes. Because if you don’t understand the role of racist policies, what are you going to think? You’re going to use narratives, what I call “personal irresponsibility”: Black people have gotten where they are because they’re busy having babies, being single mothers, they don’t have good family structure, [or that they are] lazy, criminal, on welfare. All of these narratives of personal irresponsibility fill the gap when you don’t have these narratives of structural injustice.
No, it’s not that Black people are irresponsible. It’s these racist policies that I’m describing to you that account for the racial wealth gap that we’re experiencing today.
Verite News: How can somebody know that they’re currently in the process of being a victim of these systems? How can somebody identify it when it’s happening to them?
Bernadette Atuahene: One of the main examples in the book is about property tax and justice, right? So I’m just giving you an example of the property tax. The University of Chicago Center for Municipal Finance has an online system where you can literally hover over any region in America to see if property taxes in your region are unfair. And so that’s one tool that people can use today in New Orleans and all over America to figure out if this unfairness is affecting their home in their area where they live, anywhere in America. So that’s one example.