Summary of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit

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#1 In August 1967, the House of Representatives rejected a bill to exterminate rats in the inner city, and in response the protestors chanted We want a rat bill! at progressively higher volumes. The previous attempt at passing the bill had not been simply voted down but ridiculed in the process.

#2 During the Watts rebellion, a reporter interviewed two Black teenagers about why the riots had happened. One explained where he and his family lived: We live in a two-bedroom apartment. The rent is too high and rats, they are big. You open the back door and one of them jumps over your foot from the back porch. But we still have to live there.

#3 In 1966, a Chicago baby was killed by a rat while sleeping in his crib. More than a thousand African Americans gathered on Chicago’s West Side in protest.

#4 The urban vermin trope symbolized the degradation of Black urban life in the United States. It was a product of repeated reports by African American media about the conditions in cities, which were largely ignored by mainstream explanations that blamed the housekeeping and hygiene of individual families.

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Release date

Ebook: May 2, 2022