Plundered

Bernadette Atuahene examines how racist policies undermine Black homeownership in America. 

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.

Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice not limited to Detroit.

Just as Evicted uses Milwaukee to discuss America’s eviction crisis, Professor Atuahene’s powerful scholarship and riveting storytelling analyze and explain how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. By following the lives of two Detroit grandfathers, one Black and the other white, and their grandchildren, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.

Author Ibram X. Kendi, acclaimed for his books Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist, writes that “Plundered combines meticulous research and a powerful multi-generational narrative to lift the veil on the ruthless consequences of racist housing policies and expose faulty victim-blaming discourses. Clear. Accessible. Compelling.”