‘Structural’ racism: from repair to reparations and back again

Social housing is a key locus of racial capitalism. Through sustained, organised abandonment we not only witness racialised processes of accumulation, but with high profile cases such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, catastrophic state-sanctioned premature death. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in the UK, this paper draws on abolitionist understandings of ‘repair’ to argue the case for social housing reparations. This has a dual purpose. On the one hand the focus on housing grounds and adds important nuance to the increasingly capacious racial capitalism literature. While on the other, it provides a necessarily radical demand for social housing tenants and activists, for whom racism is quite literally ‘structural’.