Title
Honoring and congratulating Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for being named a 2021 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow for her innovative scholarship on Black social movements and racial inequality in the United States and her critical examination of race, exploitation, and redlining in American housing policies and practices.
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WHEREAS, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Philadelphia resident and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has used her trailblazing scholarship to document how Black communities have organized against and challenged policies which deepened racial inequality in American society; and
WHEREAS, On September 28, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Dr. Taylor a 2021 MacArthur Fellow for her work analyzing the political and economic forces underlying racial inequality and the role of social movements in transforming society; and
WHEREAS, The MacArthur fellowship is awarded to "extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential" and is intended to encourage recipients to pursue their creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations; and
WHEREAS, Taylor began her career as an organizer in Chicago, where she was instrumental in challenging evictions and the disproportionate harm they cause to Black and Brown families; and
WHEREAS, After witnessing the extreme segregation in Chicago, Taylor enrolled in graduate studies at Northwestern University to further study housing disparities. Taylor's doctoral dissertation went beyond existing analyses of racist housing policies to investigate the ways in which the private real estate sector deeply influenced government entities to extract profit from Black communities, despite laws banning housing discrimination; and
WHEREAS, This dissertation laid the foundation for her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which examines how the capitalist underpinnings of housing in th...
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