This chapter examines the key role of race in producing property values in the history of the American property law system. It identifies major developments in the mutually formative relationship between race and property in America that made and remade property interests through the processes of dispossessing nonwhites; degrading their homelands, communities, and selves; and limiting their efforts to enter public space and occupy or acquire property within the regime thereby established. The chapter begins by looking at the use of law to create the two most important forms of property in the colonies and early Republic—enclosed land and enslaved human beings—both of which acquired value and status as property through white ownership and control. The way that race produced property values shifted significantly after the abolition of slavery, and the anti-blackness entrenched by the slave trade spurred and organized resistance to Black landownership and property rights more generally. After the government consolidated the national territory through conquest, it drew upon the continuing backlash to abolition and widespread desire for racial segregation to remake the infrastructure and the very commodities on offer on the real estate market through its notorious redlining program and establishment of a major secondary mortgage market.
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