Race and Property Law

Abstract

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.

In-School Suspension Through the Lens of Whiteness as Property: Exploring a School District’s Role in Maintaining Educational Inequality

“…Write Ladson-Billings and Tate, “the ability to define, possess, and own property has been a central feature of power in America” (1995, p. 55). The impact of race as a “structuring force in the history of property” has been so extensive that “it is difficult to identify a part of the law that has not been touched” (Park, 2021, p. 1). Beginning in the colonial era, typically only White, male, property owners could vote.…”

“…Property ownership thus served as the primary mechanism for the exercise and protection of legal rights and associated economic and political privileges. In the colonies and early America, “the two most important forms of property…both of which acquired monetary value and status… were enclosed land and enslaved human beings” (Park, 2021, p. 1). For 246 years, White property ownership was based upon the transatlantic and internal American slave trades that simultaneously disposed 12.5 million African people and descendants of those same rights and wealth accrual, leading to a long legacy of unequal property ownership and related political and economic opportunities connected to it.…”

Digital Experiments with Landed Property: Robots, Race, and Rent

“…This view of economic subjectivity supported novel, racially differentiated practices of foreclosure in American colonies (Park 2016). Breaking with English legal regimes that rarely allowed for the alienation of land for unpaid debt, colonists wielded the financial technology of mortgages as “a debt instrument designed for land seizure” from Native peoples (Park 2022, p. 34). Underlining the connection between dispossession and assets, settlers also circulated Indigenous debt in a secondary market based on the value of the land collateralized in these predatory mortgages (Park 2016).…”