The Friends of Princeton University Library welcome Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will discuss her book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.” The book examines the ways that housing policies inspired and shaped by the private sector undermined the federal government’s ability to enforce fair housing rules and regulations long after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. The failure to redress the damage from decades of legalized housing discrimination allowed the housing industry to misrepresent poor conditions, overcrowding, and distressed property into evidence that Black consumers were a risk in the housing market. Taylor argues that the predatory inclusion of Black families into the post-Civil Rights homeownership market has produced debt, not wealth, while reproducing patterns of residential and racial segregation. 

Stanley N. Katz, an American historian, Director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Friends of Princeton University Library Council Member, will moderate the program.