The Residential Is Racial A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership

"Brown offers us a wide-ranging provocation about the role of perception in shaping the link between mass homeownership and the changing meaning of racial difference. This is a work of ambitious investigation that results in many gifts of scholarly precision, narrative refinement, and historical recovery."
-Davarian L. Baldwin, Trinity College "The Residential is Racial assembles a wide range of texts and deploys a keen archival sensibility to argue that racial perceptions have played an outsize role in promoting mass homeownership in the United States. An illuminating account of real estate's perceptual and affective color lines, this book asks for a reassessment of exactly what kind of values Americans attach to owning a home at all."
-Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University "Brown's incomparable study makes that case that we cannot understand property rights without comprehending the affective logic of racialized ownership. Chapter by chapter, Brown makes visible for readers the vapor trails of how racial perceptions formed in the twentieth century."
-Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University