Atuahene argued that property tax foreclosures based on illegally inflated taxes are driving Black Americans out of their homes.
William Coen
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On February 27, author Bernadette Atuahene spoke about her book Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America at the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
The event featured a panel led by Reverend William Barber II, founding director of the Center, alongside Atuahene, Professor James Forman Jr. of Yale Law, and Alexandra Nichols, a Detroit resident whose home was threatened by tax foreclosure. The talk also served as the first installment of the McSurely-Pelles-Eguavoen speaker series at the Center. The speaker series is intended to bring people together to “think deeply and wrestle with books,” according to Rev. Barber, who emphasized not “separating the academy from activism.”
Atuahene, who has a B.A. from UCLA, an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, began by discussing her career in ethnography. She described her work as “studying land stolen from Black people.” In her first book We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, she wrote about the economic and psychological effects of property confiscation on Black South Africans. She then shifted her focus “from Black victimhood to Black agency,” and soon received a grant to study Black squatters in Detroit in 2017. It was in Detroit, after seeing many legal notices of property tax foreclosure on Detroit homes, where Atuahene was inspired to shift her focus from squatting to tax foreclosure.
Atuahene argued in her talk that tax foreclosure is one of multiple racist housing policies in the U.S., including redlining, blockbusting, and urban renewal. Citing author Ibram X. Kendi, she defined racist policies as “written or unwritten laws or practices that produce or sustain racism.”
In reviewing her book and research, Atuahene discussed how she discovered that, in Detroit since 2009, one in three homes has completed the tax foreclosure process; numbers like this haven’t been seen since the Great Depression. Searching for a cause of this trend, she learned that “Detroit overtaxed 53-85 percent of homes between 2009 and 2015” in violation of the Constitution of Michigan. Homeowners were unable to pay these “illegally inflated” property taxes, leading to foreclosures.
Based on her research in Michigan cities, Atuahene argued in the talk that majority Black cities are “overtaxed or foreclosed on at a much greater rate” than majority white cities. She added that Detroit is just “ground zero” for a national issue of tax foreclosures. But Detroit is also the “epicenter of the resistance.” In regards to activism, Atuahene discussed how she established the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, which seeks to stop illegally inflated property taxes nationally, stop ongoing foreclosures in Detroit, and provide compensation to those who have lost their homes. The Coalition has halted 13,000 tax foreclosures in Detroit by pressuring Wayne County to place a moratorium on foreclosures on owner-occupied homes, helped over 1,000 Detroit homeowners apply for American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, appealed illegal property tax assessments for over 1,000 Detroit homeowners, and secured six million dollars for the people of Detroit.
Atuahene concluded by emphasizing that “people lose so much through tax foreclosure,” not just their homes. She declared that “individual efforts are no match for broken systems” and “it’s not about personal responsibility, it’s about structural injustice.”
Nichols discussed the pain of learning about property tax foreclosure on her home in Detroit, which she inherited from her parents. “This is not the Detroit I know,” she said. She asked, “Why is the city government of Detroit not fighting for its citizens?” She felt she had let her parents down, expressing a great concern for the future the city government may offer to their most vulnerable constituents.
Looking to a call to action, Rev. Barber remarked during the panel that “whether we’re dealing with housing issues, or voting rights issues, whatever comes in life, whatever is our calling and our gift, we must act, not just for ourselves but for others.”