book review: Family Properties by Beryl Satter
Thursday, August 8th, 2013 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kFamily Properties:
Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
Beryl Satter
I learned about it on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at the Atlantic. I dare you to read his posts (with excellent excerpts) and then not read the whole book. TNC and his worthwhile commenters explore how individual racist acts and decisions become an inescapable web of control preventing African-Americans from owning property in Chicago. Their lives are demeaned, their options shut off because they can't accumulate any wealth which could make it possible to cope with job loss, illness or pay for an education.
Personally, Family Properties hooked me in its exploration of Jewishness: how do our values support and conflict with fair housing? The Black-Jewish relationship has always been energized by the thrill of recognition and the crash of continuing difference. TNC's discussion highlights some of these contradictions.
Family Properties explores history along several dimensions. The financial ranges from individual building owners (most earn the familiar term "slumlord") to city, county, state, and Federal bodies charged with administering, regulating, and issuing the money used to buy and maintain those buildings. It was horrifying to realize that at all levels, official policy prevented African-Americans from owning homes.
Satter's political analysis examines that remarkable and awful entity, the Chicago Machine, and how Daley the First extended into every neighborhood and out to the state lines. She also discusses famous community activists, both Saul Alinksy (local) and Martin Luther King (outside), and how neither of their approaches managed to effect change in late 60s Chicago. She finishes with the Contract Buyers' League, a truly grassroots force which was able to mobilize thousands. Importantly, she also explores how slowly the cogs of the law turn—which provided me with deep appreciation for the civil-rights lawyers who work in three-decade time frames. Her epilogue connects the dots between the systematic oppression of African-Americans by white realtors and bankers in the 1940s-1960s and the predatory lending in our more recent crash.
Finally the personal: this book is framed with Satter's memoir of her relationships with her father and brothers. Mark J Satter, the author's father, was a leftist, ex-Communist, Jewish civil rights lawyer who attempted to represent African-Americans cheated in their goal of home-ownership. Of course the personal is always more complicated: Mark J Satter was also the owner of several rental buildings in the ghetto. I empathize with the ten-year-old Beryl, whose father has just died of a heart attack, trying to parse the financial mysteries she hears about in whispers. Her older brother Paul, still an undergraduate, writes one of the earliest essays to blame "pathological social relations" for African-American's terrible living conditions. Her other brother David carefully maintained complete records of her father's life, which enabled her to create this fascinating book.
I strongly urge any white person interested in becoming a better ally to African-Americans to read Family Properties.
Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
Beryl Satter
I learned about it on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at the Atlantic. I dare you to read his posts (with excellent excerpts) and then not read the whole book. TNC and his worthwhile commenters explore how individual racist acts and decisions become an inescapable web of control preventing African-Americans from owning property in Chicago. Their lives are demeaned, their options shut off because they can't accumulate any wealth which could make it possible to cope with job loss, illness or pay for an education.
Personally, Family Properties hooked me in its exploration of Jewishness: how do our values support and conflict with fair housing? The Black-Jewish relationship has always been energized by the thrill of recognition and the crash of continuing difference. TNC's discussion highlights some of these contradictions.
Family Properties explores history along several dimensions. The financial ranges from individual building owners (most earn the familiar term "slumlord") to city, county, state, and Federal bodies charged with administering, regulating, and issuing the money used to buy and maintain those buildings. It was horrifying to realize that at all levels, official policy prevented African-Americans from owning homes.
Satter's political analysis examines that remarkable and awful entity, the Chicago Machine, and how Daley the First extended into every neighborhood and out to the state lines. She also discusses famous community activists, both Saul Alinksy (local) and Martin Luther King (outside), and how neither of their approaches managed to effect change in late 60s Chicago. She finishes with the Contract Buyers' League, a truly grassroots force which was able to mobilize thousands. Importantly, she also explores how slowly the cogs of the law turn—which provided me with deep appreciation for the civil-rights lawyers who work in three-decade time frames. Her epilogue connects the dots between the systematic oppression of African-Americans by white realtors and bankers in the 1940s-1960s and the predatory lending in our more recent crash.
Finally the personal: this book is framed with Satter's memoir of her relationships with her father and brothers. Mark J Satter, the author's father, was a leftist, ex-Communist, Jewish civil rights lawyer who attempted to represent African-Americans cheated in their goal of home-ownership. Of course the personal is always more complicated: Mark J Satter was also the owner of several rental buildings in the ghetto. I empathize with the ten-year-old Beryl, whose father has just died of a heart attack, trying to parse the financial mysteries she hears about in whispers. Her older brother Paul, still an undergraduate, writes one of the earliest essays to blame "pathological social relations" for African-American's terrible living conditions. Her other brother David carefully maintained complete records of her father's life, which enabled her to create this fascinating book.
I strongly urge any white person interested in becoming a better ally to African-Americans to read Family Properties.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-10 07:37 am (UTC)