Andrew W. Kahrl

Another chapter in the extended story of white expropriation of black labor and land. Racial and environmental exploitation went hand in hand; segregation on the beaches became more important to whites as whites saw more value in beachgoing and beach-adjacent property. Blacks were barred from swimming in pleasant areas and blamed for letting their children run wild if those hot and summer-sweaty children strayed into white areas (and were beaten or worse) or swam and drowned in non-humanly dangerous areas. When African-Americans agitated for beach access, they were met with protest or with “beaches” exposed to raw sewage and denied lifeguards. Still, black people carved out spaces of their own—which have now mostly been lost.

The book is also an excellent demonstration of the truth in Carol Rose’s work on the significant but undersung role of pleasure in property law—especially in the law relating to water and its associated shores. It’s further an excellent illustration of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ argument about white expropriation of black wealth, which was repeated, coordinated, reinforced by overlapping levels of government and private agreements, and kicked into panic gear whenever African-Americans seemed to be accumulating sufficient land to provide them with security/less need to depend on whites (to which something like intellectual property or success in sports might intriguingly and sadly be contrasted).

“Working within discriminatory real estate markets and denied equal access to credit, African Americans with ambitions to own land and start businesses were often led to enter into dubious investment schemes, take out large loans on usurious terms, or engage in other necessary risks in order to achieve the American dream of landed and economic independence.” If the contract terms weren’t bad enough, white businesses would conspire to destroy black competition, often with the assistance of local governments and their permit powers, and in extremis there was always fire or other acts of terrorism to destroy working capital. Discriminatorily assessed local property taxes, insulated from outside scrutiny, were also deployed to prevent blacks from living in areas whites wanted for themselves. Internal divisions among African-Americans led some “higher-class” (and often lighter-skinned) people to try to exclude others they perceived as socially beneath them using language indistinguishable from that of the politer white racists, though this wasn’t aided by government as it would have been with whites—instead, Maryland sheriffs underpoliced African-American beach areas, allowing both whites and blacks to misbehave.

Even successfully participating in capitalism could mean extracting wealth from fellow African-Americans, often the only apparent source of advancement. Then in later years, when formal segregation was no longer legal and the land became valuable to white people, distant heirs might force a sale at below-market rates for a small share of what was otherwise worthless to them. “Fifty years ago, a wooden groin topped with a metal fence extended into the waters off Hampton’s shore [in Virginia], dividing ‘white’ from ‘colored’ sand and water and, perhaps fittingly, accelerating rates of erosion on both sides.” Now there are expensive homes and colorblind, facially neutral regimes that somehow still end up with white people on top.… (altro)