For decades governments and private institutions have redlined Black citizens from financial services, severed their neighborhoods with hostile infrastructure, and enacted other policies designed to impoverish and disempower marginalized groups. Though some of those practices still exist in some form, emerging public consciousness and civil rights activists have put increasing pressure on policymakers to take steps to rectify this.
One method, practiced in cities like Detroit, has been to demolish swathes of empty buildings abandoned by white flight, allowed to decay by a tax-starved municipal government, and withheld from Black residents by “blockbusting” agents selling them only after massive markups. The logic, according to its proponents, is to make space for majority-Black populations to flourish. But in “Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures,” author Nicholas Caverly records his observations and research from field work in Detroit, arguing that those demolitions have largely maintained rather than removed racial inequities.
