Speaker Series: David Troutt
Urban renewal, a mid-century federal-local redevelopment program that transformed American cities and displaced millions of Black migrants from the South, was a race-conscious government policy responsible for the enduring suppression of Black wealth. Its racial history and character are untold in legal scholarship. This article argues that the 25-year regime enacted in the Housing Act of 1949 was a response to the Great Migration of Black workers and families to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It was codified to interact with other segregation policies, such as highway construction, restrictive covenants, redlining, and public housing, through the colorblind veneer of rational planning principles. Race planning created durable conditions of “racial bargaining,” the discounted value of wealth-producing transactions in segregated Black communities. Since its mid-century enactment, urban renewal federalized a race-conscious segregation policy that eluded civil rights remedies and framed contemporary urban development programs. The article shows how this framework sustained the racial wealth gap at the core of this country’s continuing struggle with structural inequality.
Reframing requires reckoning. The article presents, for the first time, the case for restorative remedies to Black descendants of the U.S. urban renewal program. Offering an architecture of accountability for race-conscious wrongs, the article conceptualizes three buckets of contemporaneous, future, and cumulative harms, an analysis of government wrongfulness, and illustrative restorative programs.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
_____________________________________________________________________
David Dante Troutt (he/him) is professor of law (Justice John J. Francis Scholar) and the founding director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME). He teaches and writes in four areas of primary interest: the metropolitan dimensions of race, class and legal structure; intellectual property; Torts; and critical legal theory. His major publications (noted below) include books of fiction and non-fiction, scholarly articles and a variety of legal and political commentary on race, law and equality. A member of the faculty since 1995 after practicing corporate and public interest law in New York and California, Troutt founded CLiME in 2013 in order to provide a research resource for students and the public interested in the growing challenges of municipalities and families trying to sustain middle-class outcomes amid growing fiscal constraints and rapid demographic change.
Several themes characterize Troutt’s work. A key feature of his writing and teaching about the intersections of race, class and place concerns identifying blind spots in conventional analyses of spatially determined opportunity through structuralist and interdisciplinary analysis. This work involves inquiries about meanings of colorblindness, the role of inequity in persistent marginalization, and the utility of civil rights theories in addressing concentrated poverty. Troutt is conducting ongoing research on developing the principle of mutuality in public law. Key themes in Troutt’s writing about intellectual property include personhood and authorship in copyright and trademark. Key aspects of his work in critical theory include the uses of narrative methodology, cultural constructions of marginalization and the dynamic life of stereotypes.
Professor Troutt is a frequent public speaker and contributor to a variety of national periodicals, including Politico, Huffington Post, Reuters and The Crisis. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his juris doctor from Harvard Law School.