Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Two years into the COVID 19 pandemic, lockdowns and closures have left millions of the global majority out of work, hungry, facing eviction, and desperately navigating hollowed out, underfunded health and social service agencies and a patchwork of woefully inadequate tenant protection programs. “Stay at home” orders designed to slow the spread of COVID presumed access to uninterrupted income, as well as the means to shelter in place, yet again exposing how the differentiation and mitigation of risk—the stakes of life and death—is rooted within hierarchical orderings of race and class that devalue certain bodies and places and that distribute access and opportunity. While eviction moratoriums and rent freezes established at the onset of the pandemic have expired, rental prices have dramatically increased, with average rents in the US up by 14% nationwide, up to 40% in some cities, and a forecasted 10% rise in the coming year (Bhattarai, 2022). Indeed, accounts of eviction, poverty, and preventable death sit discordantly alongside reports of a rebounding economy and booming real estate market. 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?

Though geographers have long interrogated property’s origins and operation under capitalist relations (e.g. Harvey, 2008; Smith, 2002), there is resurging interest, particularly building on Nicholas Blomley’s path-defining work (e.g. Blomley, 2004, 2005, 2016), in tracing the genealogies of modern property relations. By genealogies, we mean the stories that are used to justify the emergence of private property as a self-evident institution, but that also reveal the violence and impunity through which property-making proceeds. We argue that this renewed attention to the genealogies of property-making takes seriously property’s legitimation through and reliance on social difference (e.g. Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Bonds, 2019; Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak, 2019; Ranganathan, 2016; Roy, 2017; Safransky, 2017). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, liberalism, and colonialism, critical property research interrogates how property and race come into being in mutually constitutive ways. This special issue aims to add empirical texture and analytical specificity to the conversation on racial regimes of property across the global North and South. We start from the premise that race-making’s property histories, and conversely, property-making’s racial histories, remain underexplored in critical geography literature.

Property is generally understood as a “self-evident category” (Blomley, 2004: 2)—intuitively speaking, property is that which belongs to someone or something. Conjured though legal and extralegal enactments, property is deeply embedded in social and cultural life and is taken for granted in liberal modes of thinking. It operates as an unquestioned universality. Indicating the right to own something, and the right to enjoy that thing, legally recognized forms of property include real and tangible property, such as privately and publicly owned land, as well as intellectual property. Yet this commonsense notion of property as a “thing” obscures the web of social and power relations that must be performed to produce property as legitimate. Modern property, then, is not only an essential component of capitalist political economy but is also a shifting social formation animated by contextual assemblages of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Theorized this way, property is far from fixed, but rather is an unfolding and continuously enacted set of relations that necessitates and in turn shapes the hierarchical valuation of bodies and places.

It should be stressed, as Marxists have long done, that property, as an exchange commodity, is secured not simply through state, market, and so-called legal interventions—the price, the title, the deed, the survey, the land registry, the police, and so on—but also informal, unwritten, and coercive forces of looting and fraud (Luxemburg, 1968). Property comes into this world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 2010 [1887]). As is well documented, property’s material and symbolic significance is rooted in the ostensible shift from feudal to capitalist relations, even though feudalism etched by race, religion, and caste, for example, continues to prevail and structure capitalism (Robinson, 2000). Our focus on racial regimes of property draws from key scholarship theorizing property in its multiple meanings as both “an object and a relation” (Correia, 2013: 7), including the written and unwritten terms, contracts, and logics underpinning ownership (Bhandar, 2014, 2018; Blomley, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016; Moreton-Roberts, 2015; Roy, 2003, 2017).

Using the settler-colonial contexts of Canada, Australia, and Israel/Palestine, Brenna Bhandar (2018) tracks regimes of property law—the juridical formation underpinning capital accumulation—that unfolded together with racial schemas and state violence to produce colonial subjects. One of Bhandar’s key arguments is that liberal thought and its norms of ownership and exclusion were not just dependent on racial differentiation (see especially Lowe, 2015; Mehta, 1999; Mills, 2008) but were also generative of racial differentiation—a process she refers to as “propertied abstraction.” Examining property necessitates thinking across different registers and forms of abstraction, including engagement with race itself as an abstraction. Indeed, geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002: 16) defines racism as “a practice of abstraction, a death dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories.” As such, race is made material through its articulation with other abstractions, including abstractions related to property possession and dispossession. Emphasizing this connection, Bhandar (2014: 211) argues that “abstraction functions in such a way so as to create legal forms of property and racial ontologies coterminously”—a “property-racial matrix,” (Bhandar, 2014) if you will.

The papers in this special issue, the outcome of sessions organized at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, start from Bhandar’s (2018) notion of “racial regimes of ownership” to theorize how property depends on historical and renewed modes of racial and other forms of differentiation. Yet, they also seek to move beyond the settler-colonial contexts profiled in Bhandar’s book, and beyond the category of “ownership” to include variegated regimes of access and tenure (e.g. rent and tenancy). In addition, the authors seek to trouble the rigidity of relations of domination so often portrayed in critical property studies, instead bringing to light the tenuousness, ambiguity, and messiness of the property-racial matrix, and the forms of resistance and refusal that render imaginative futures beyond property. It is one of the chief contentions of this special issue that while they may seem hegemonic and fixed, racial regimes of property are inherently unstable, constantly subject to undoing through and beyond their own internal logics. Marshalling critical property studies across disciplines and original empirical data, these papers extend scholarly conversations along three analytical axes: property’s (i) logics, (ii) materialities, and (iii) refusals.

Logics

Modern ontologies of property—notions of how property comes into being and how it inhabits the world—are thoroughly steeped in liberal, physiocratic, and utilitarian logics and assumptions; so steeped that it is difficult to see beyond the liberal pale. The socialist scholar CB MacPherson (1962) denaturalized these assumptions, and showed, drawing on Marx (often implicitly rather than explicitly), how indelibly tied liberal ontologies of property are to the logic of “possessive individualism,” a logic that MacPherson found lurking, in particular, in the writings of John Locke. As an originator of physiocratic thought, Locke was preoccupied with how property is born out of the relationship between one’s labor and the creation of value. If something had been vested with an individual’s labor, and therefore now had utility and therefore value, then it could be said to be properly possessed by that individual. Once possessed, such ownership guards against the overreach of the state. Reflecting on MacPherson’s intellectual legacy, Lindsay (2012) argues that at the core of “possessive” in “possessive individualism” is not ownership of the thing per se, but rather ownership and control over one’s labor. Taken to its extreme, to control property is essentially to control one’s person.

It is this assumption of control and free will over one’s person that Black radical and critical scholars of race (e.g. Bhandar, 2018; Harris, 1993; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Walcott, 2021) have probed by asking: who, according to modern property law, is the individual entitled to such self-possession? What is the ontological logic of such personhood? For Lockean thought to be internally consistent, the enslaved and non-European subjects necessarily had to be rendered sub-human and savage, devoid of personhood and incapable and unworthy of possessing their own selves. As Cedric Robinson (2000) reminds us, while racialism predates capitalism, the former was necessary for the latter to propagate: accumulation did not and could not develop outside of racial capitalism. The rise of chattel slavery in a global capitalist system in the seventeenth-century hardened the hierarchical division of humans and construction of racial ontologies: darker races were understood to be sub-human, capable of the extraordinary physical challenges necessary to produce productive property. In short, enslaved peoples were rendered as the lucrative property of others to make lucrative property for others. It followed from this logic that only European modalities of self-comportment, transforming and relating to the land, and taming nature could “count as property” (Blomley, 2004: 14, emphasis original). Indeed, the word “property” has at its root “proper” and “propriety,” or as Jodi Byrd et al. (2018: 3) put it, the word contains “a supposition of civilization and civility” (see also Blomley, 2005). European settlers viewed communal access to land and resources by Indigenous and Aboriginal groups in the Americas and Australia as the very definition of civilizational backwardness. Only those forms of labor and possession “characteristic of white settlement” could be “recognized and legitimated” as Harris (1993: 1722) writes. Conversely, non-European and/or non-possessory idioms of relating to the land were delegitimated and “desecrated” (Nichols, 2018: 12)—a process that continues today (Borras et al., 2011; Mollett, 2015; Wily, 2012).

All papers in this special issue address property’s internal (and sometimes internally contradictory) racial logics, demonstrating how these logics hinge, implicitly or explicitly, on the refusal to grant humanity and personhood to certain subjects. For instance, Ted Rutland (2022) draws on Black humanist scholars Sylvia Wynter (2003), Katherine McKittrick (2006), and Françoise Vergès (2006) to identify how, well beyond the end of slavery, new rubrics of criminalization devised by French Canadian settlers were directed at Black tenants in Montreal. The tenant, Rutland concludes, is never just a tenant but is also a “racial subject.” As white Quebecois’ tenant rights were strengthened through ostensibly progressive pro-tenant policies throughout the 1970s–1990s, so too did Black Quebecois’ evictions, arrests, and ghettoization (and associated negative media images and discourses in the mainstream) heighten. To put it in Adam Bledsoe’s (2015) words, “the supposed non-being of the Black [person]” is tied to “the assumed inability of Black space to exist” (a contention also of Mia Dawson’s (2022) piece on abolitionist politics and property which is described below). If the ontological status of property and human are sutured together, then so too are the “non-being” of each.

French racial schemas of ordering property and personhood are also taken up in Erin Collins’ and Sylvia Nam’s (2022) paper in a different context—that of colonial Indochina (Cambodia)—where we come to understand that property-making is a messy project. Prone to contradiction and failure, colonial regimes of property operated in the gap between “the law” and the “actual situation.” The French used property as a barometer of civilizational status: a lack of private property norms among the ethnic Khmer was seen as backwards and called for paternalistic protection by colonizers, while high rates of property ownership among the Chinese were viewed as an economic threat and called for elimination by colonizers. But in attempting to exclude the Chinese from property ownership, colonial authorities paradoxically opened up legal loopholes that colonial subjects could exploit. These legal openings continue to be successfully exploited in a contemporary real estate market rife with fraud and speculation, not least because of flexible interpretations of eligibility criteria that depend on race, ethnicity, and nationality devised by prior colonial regimes (Nam, 2020).

Moving to the U.S., where corruption, predation, and fraud are always somehow “whitened” (Tucker, 2020) or legally condoned to make way for profit, several papers in this issue underscore real estate’s dubiously legal and downright unethical financial mechanisms. Urban scholars have long historicized the role played by mortgage redlining in the exclusion of African Americans and other minorities from property markets (e.g. Freund, 2007; Highsmith, 2015; Sugrue, 2005). Such racist mechanisms are not a thing of the past: Sara Safransky’s (2019) research, for instance, points to a troubling trend in which digital algorithms that mimic redlining are being deployed in the so-called “smart city” of today (see also Benjamin, 2019). A common-sense understanding of the legacies of racist planning tools like redlining is that they have hastened disinvestment, or the steady withdrawal of capital from minority neighborhoods. Writing against this commonsense assumption, Rea Zaimi (2022) proposes hyperextractive investment, or the influx of capital into abandoned neighborhoods extracted from Chicago’s unsuspecting Black residents, as a useful analytic. Here, Zaimi draws on Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s (2019: 5) study of “predatory inclusion,” a process through which “African American homebuyers were granted access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing, but on more expensive and comparatively unequal terms.” Analyzing over 10,000 postwar property records in Chicago’s southside, Zaimi shows that Black buyers suffered heavy losses upon buying distressed properties at exorbitant prices; by the time that they were eventually forced to vacate, white real estate speculators had made a windfall profit. This chain of events indicates, in a nutshell, the “extractive value of racism” (Zaimi, 2022).

Materialities

So “self-evident” is landed property that it is often taken to consist of dry land or a concrete fixture. But much of the property we take for granted is conjured from wetland, swampland, and wasteland. The materiality of water-land-waste ecologies matters. Take historian Debjani Bhattacharyya’s (2018) study of colonial west Bengal, wherein the slushy deltaic landscape is consequential for colonial economies of speculation, profit, and risk, as well as the racialized and civilizational schemas through which British colonizers ranked themselves vis-à-vis the native Indian. The transformation of swamps into alienable property on the California coast in Lindsey Dillon’s work (2022) similarly studies the civilizational ranking of human subjects together with the civilizational status of land. Swamps in California, as elsewhere, were associated with moral decay, pestilence, and danger, “threatening to the Anglo-European body” (Dillon, 2022). She shows that state-led swampland reclamation aimed to “improve” such “wasteland” by transforming it into private parcels (see also Gidwani, 1992). The liberal-colonial ideology of improvement implemented in both urban and agrarian environments aimed at both economic enhancement and the biopolitical and moral betterment of inferior classed and raced subjects (Bhandar, 2018; Kidambi, 2001; Legg, 2007; Ranganathan, 2018; Thompson, 1993; Wideman, 2019; Yeoh, 2003). Dillon examines how swamplands were dredged, filled in, and carved up for settler profit not only because they could be, given their fluid materiality, but crucially also because of the racialization of Chinese labor. Paradoxically the very laborers deployed for the accumulationist projects of swampland dredging and railroad building—poor Chinese workers—were denied citizenship and property ownership via nineteenth-century constitutional law (see also Cowen, 2019; Karuka, 2018).

Anna Livia Brand (2022) turns her attention to a different marshland landscape, that of post-Katrina New Orleans. Deploying geological metaphors, she suggests that whiteness is the very “substrate”—the imaginary subterranean sediment—upon which settler pasts and futures in New Orleans are normalized and guaranteed. She shows how white neighborhoods experienced remarkably different recovery trajectories from Black neighborhoods. Whereas low-lying, flood-prone Black neighborhoods were decommissioned by the city’s planners—their evacuated residents discouraged or forbidden from returning—equally risky white neighborhoods, such as Lakeview (95% white in a majority Black city) witnessed a revitalization because its material riskiness was annulled by its material whiteness. Through this blatant discrepancy, Brand demonstrates the maintenance of whiteness-as-property despite all material odds, namely low topography, poor soil profile, and risk of subsidence. Brand concludes that white supremacy operates as both a material force and as a logic of urban planning.

Refusals

If “the ontological baggage embedded in hegemonic understandings of property needs to be recognized and challenged” (Chen and Kuan, 2018: 989), how should this be done? Papers in this issue emphasize that liberal logics of property and hierarchical divisions of the human are neither permanent nor totalizing. To be sure, it can be difficult, if not impossible, for scholars and activists to seriously challenge inherited liberal frameworks. Terms like “common property,” “customary land tenure,” or “collective ownership” are at times too simplistically and homogenously ascribed to non-western, Indigenous, or subaltern cultures. As Bryan (2000) argues, alternative conceptualizations of property always tend to be refracted through liberal referents, while the complexity of Indigenous and Aboriginal land regimes is lost or distorted in translation. It would be naïve to romanticize pre-colonial or non-western ontologies of property, moreover, either as wholly egalitarian (for instance casteist feudal land regimes in pre-colonial India perpetuated bondage, exclusion, and landlessness well before British imperialism), or as sealed off from liberal frameworks. Indeed, in colonial South Asia, liberal worldviews and property frameworks were appropriated and indigenized by local actors (Bayly, 2007; Guha, 1996; Kumar and Roy, 2019; Sartori, 2014). As a fundamentally agonistic political project, liberalism can be self-critical, serving as both the object and vehicle of contestation (Roy, 2008). So, how should critical scholars disrupt unjust and extractive property frameworks, yet avoid romanticizing or hermetically sealing off antiracist, radical, and redistributive imaginaries and relations with property?

Sara Safransky (2022), Heather Dorries (2022), and Mia Dawson (2022) do this through a nuanced and dialectical engagement with grammars of reckoning, decoloniality, and abolition. First, Safransky takes up “political grammars of reckoning and redress,” namely a set of languages and debates that explicitly confront rather than shy away from historical dispossession, genocide, institutionalized racism, and ongoing trauma done unto Black, Latinx, and Indigenous groups in the U.S. She reminds us, however, that merely truth-telling about trauma without actual reparations is insufficient. Thus, while sympathetically reviewing liberal Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of the kinds witnessed in Canada and South Africa, Safransky also examines what monetary reparations and “land back” movements by Black and Indigenous groups would respectively entail. Here, too, liberal grammars surrounding property and state sovereignty delimit what is deemed feasible or practical, resulting in reparations being a vital, yet ultimately as-yet unheeded call. It is, finally, in decolonial and abolitionist imaginaries that possessory and exclusionary frameworks of property can be thoroughly disrupted.

Dorries (2022) studies decolonial imaginaries as animated in non-textual Indigenous art, which sits outside of the settler-colonial written word. Asking what planning would be without property, she profiles the work of First Nations (Algonquin) artist Nadia Myre as a guide in answering this question. Myre uses beadwork to express a rejection of written property laws, thereby reasserting indigenous identity, collective belonging, and “commoning” against European “possessory logics” (Porter, 2014). Alternative sociospatial ontologies witnessed among the Algonquin require nothing less than the “transformation of the self and our relations with one another” (Bhandar, 2018: 193). This is a transformation that cultivates a decolonial praxis and humility by positioning human and more-than-human agency as mutually dependent, and land not as inert, commodified, and passively awaiting human dominion but as “alive and thinking” (Watts, 2013: 21). Dorries contrasts Algonquin conceptualizations of land with modern planning as we know it, contending that the latter is so reliant on possessory logics that planners are loathe to admit it, let alone envision a world without it. Yet, planning must face up to such an abolitionist challenge—“the end of planning as we know it” (Dorries, 2022)—if the profession is to live up to its purported ideals of social justice.

Finally, Dawson (2022) contributes to abolition geography by insisting that abolition is just as much about the end of property as it is about the end of policing and prisons. Here, Dawson joins critical scholars who theorize the racist institutions of property and policing in North America together (e.g. Bonds, 2019; Derickson, 2016; Gilmore, 2007; Singh, 2017; Walcott, 2021). As Nikhil Pal Singh (2017: 38) observes, policing in America provides a “method for regulating and securing the unequal ordering of property relations”—a method more often than not “arrogated to white citizens.” Studying the politics of Black Lives Matter (BLM), which organized around the police-shooting of a 23-year-old unarmed Black man, Stephon Clark, in Sacramento, California, Dawson develops the notion of “property abolition” as a related but distinct project from policing/prison abolition. Property abolition seeks to reclaim urban public space, as was witnessed with the rise of BLM protests across the nation. It directly challenges physical barriers—fences, hedges, walls, and gates—designed to exclude the poor and people of color. Renewed and ongoing techniques of privatization and securitization in support of propertied interests—from new forms surveillance and digital technologies, hostile design and planning techniques developed to enclose and divide, and curfews and ordinances limiting access to urban space—underscore the significance of “disrespecting property” as abolitionist praxis. Across the world, elite groups live in “cities of walls” (Caldeira, 2000) guarded by private security forces. Dawson shows that BLM-Sacramento chose a playful tactic of trivializing such carceral enclosures by setting up camp outside the “rent-a-fence” erected around the District Attorney’s office (an emblem of police power) and going as far as to hold a “birthday party” for it to commemorate five months of the protest. By rendering a fence meant to keep protestors out as a farcical object, BLM effectively “desanctifies” both property and the police, imagining a world without either.

Thinking across a range of geographic contexts and historical periods, the critical dialogues in this issue offer analyses of the failures, erasures, and violences of property as an always contested and unfolding project producing and mobilizing racial difference. Yet, in critiquing the production of racial subjects via regimes of property that value and order bodies and places through modes of ownership, demarcation, and extraction, the contributions to this special issue also disrupt, rethink, and imagine more just ways of being and valuing human and more-than-human life. Ultimately, all papers in this special issue return to an urgent call: to disrupt racial regimes of property requires a disruption of racial ontologies of the human. Following Willie Jamal Wright (2019: 11), a refusal of racial regimes of property requires nothing less than “a complete regeneration of the notion of humanness.”

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Malini Ranganathan is an associate professor at the School of International Service and affiliate faculty of the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. A critical geographer, she focuses on how histories of racial capitalism, property, and labor structure urban environmental injustices wrought by race and caste in the U.S. and India.

Anne Bonds is an associate professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Anne is feminist geographer whose research interests include race and racial capitalism, critical housing studies, and carceral and abolition geographies.

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