UC Berkeley

Financial violence is racial violence: geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the death-dealing abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems. Rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, producing life-giving geographies of housing requires bringing collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.