The police killings of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black men and women evoked painful memories of bygone lynchings and sparked a slew of national and international protests and discussions about anti-Black racism. In Plundered, Harvard and Yale trained law professor, Bernadette Atuahene, seeks to expand the focus of our nation’s racial justice conversation from the physical violence that state agents exert to the less conspicuous, but intensely damaging bureaucratic violence that they routinely inflict. Based on over eight years of ethnographic research, litigation, and community organizing around Detroit’s illegally inflated property taxes and its resulting tax foreclosure epidemic, Plundered highlights an underreported national phenomenon: public agencies that replenish public coffers through racist policies. By following the lives of two grandfathers who migrated to Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to work at Ford Motor Company—a Black sharecropper from North Carolina and a white sharecropper from Italy—and their grandchildren, Atuahene tells a riveting, braided tale about racist policies, including what they look and feel like, where and how they take root, why they advance and flourish, who they impact, and who profits.
