Racial Regimes of Property: Introduction to the Special Issue
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Co-authored by Malini Ranganathan and Anne Bonds

Excerpt: Against the backdrop of cleaving inequality, financiers, speculators, and the propertied classes have leveraged their equity and exploited historically low lending rates to acquire and expand property holdings. Racial regimes, the critical race scholar Cheryl Harris (2020: 3) observes in an update to her canonical essay “Whiteness as Property,” both “construct and exploit vulnerabilities.” Yet even as the finance-lubricated “machineries of dispossession” (Rolnik, 2019: 4) redouble the raced and classed boundaries between the propertied and the propertyless, the voices of the dispossessed are not—and cannot—be silenced (Harris, 2020; Kelley, 2021). Such accounts of racialized property relations bring to the fore a number of questions increasingly of concern to geographers. How do modern forms of property and race co-evolve through the dialectics of (dis)possession and struggle? How is property enacted and normalized discursively and materially over time and across space, and with what social and political effects?

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