Online Roundtable: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s ‘Race for Profit’
March 8-12, 2021
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting a roundtable on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize from AAIHS. The roundtable begins on Monday, March 8, 2021 and concludes on Friday, March 12, 2021. It will feature pieces from Paige Glotzer (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Kimberley Johnson (New York University), Jessica Ann Levy (SUNY Purchase), and Julia Rabig (Dartmouth College). At the conclusion of the roundtable, the author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Princeton University) will respond. On Friday at 12noon EST, Dr. Taylor will join Davarian L. Baldwin (Trinity College) for a lunchtime discussion about the book.
During the week of the online roundtable, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:30AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter, like AAIHS on Facebook, or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.
About the Author
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, longlisted for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. Taylor is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter @KeeangaYamahtta.
About the Participants
Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book, entitled How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, charts how suburban developers ushered in modern housing segregation with the help of transnational financiers, real estate institutions, and public policymakers. Portions of her research have been published on Black Perspectives as well as in the Journal of Urban History and Public Seminar. Her work has also been featured in CityLab, Time, and the Baltimore Sun. Glotzer’s digital project, “Building Suburban Power,” maps the British investors who financed one of the first segregated planned suburbs in the United States. Follow her on Twitter at @apaigeoutofhist.
Kimberley Johnson is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Affiliate Faculty Member of the Wagner School of New York University. Johnson’s research focuses on American and urban political development, urban and local politics, and race and ethnic politics. Johnson is the author of two books, Reforming Jim Crow (2010) and Governing the American State (2007) and numerous articles on American political development and its intersection with racial and ethnic politics. Johnson’s current book manuscript, Dark Concrete, explores the development of black power urbanism in Newark and East Orange, New Jersey and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California. Follow her on Twitter @KimberleyNYC.
Jessica Ann Levy is an Assistant Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is currently at work on her first book, Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America, Race, and Empowerment Politics in the U.S. and Africa (University of Pennsylvania Press, under contract), examining the transnational rise of black empowerment. The dissertation upon which this book is based was awarded Betty Unterberger Dissertation Prize (SHAFR) and the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation (BHC). Prior to Purchase, Levy held postdoctoral research positions in the Democracy Initiative’s Corruption Lab at the University of Virginia and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Levy’s writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly and popular venues, including Enterprise & Society, the Journal of Urban History, The Washington Post, and Black Perspectives. She is the host of Who Makes Cents, a monthly podcast devoted to sharing quality, engaging stories that explain how capitalism has changed over time. Follow her on Twitter @jessicaannlevy.
Julia Rabig is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. Her research interests include urban history, African American Studies, and social movements. She is the author of The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, NJ, 1960-1990 (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and the co-author, with Laura Warren Hill of The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility (University of Rochester Press, 2012). She most recently published “Dangerous Librarians: The Survival of Branch Libraries in New York’s Fiscal Crisis” in The Journal of Urban History. This article examines the relationship between librarians and patrons of Bronx branch libraries during the 1970s. It is part of a larger project that illuminates late twentieth century shifts in grassroots intellectual life, patterns of gentrification, and claims to public space through the history of urban public library systems. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Pennsylvania and has also taught at University of Rochester, Boston University, and Amherst College.
Lunchtime Book Talk: Friday, March 12
At 12:00PM Eastern, AAIHS will host a book talk with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Davarian L. Baldwin (Trinity College). We will be posting registration information on the AAIHS website and on our social media feeds.
Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC, 2007), and co-editor (with Minkah Makalani) of the essay collection, Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (University of Minnesota, 2013). Baldwin is finishing the book Land of Darkness: Chicago and the Making of Race in Modern America (Oxford University Press). In addition to teaching and writing, Baldwin sits on the Executive Council of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE). He serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of African American History, and the American Studies Journal. Baldwin is also co-editor of the Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy book series for Temple University Press and was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Follow him on Twitter @DavarianBaldwin.