By demarcating racial harm as only that which is overtly stated and demonstrably intended, the syntax of official anti-racism limited what could be named and indicted as racism. This control over “the means of rationality,” as Melamed writes—over what can be considered legitimate (and legally actionable) knowledge about racism—has suppressed a structural understanding of capitalism’s role in maintaining and intensifying racial inequality throughout the post-war era, which persists to this day. Without the smoking gun of racial intent, the institutions and forces responsible for racial outcomes are too readily handwaved away, dismissed as “unknown and perhaps unknowable,” to quote the Supreme Court’s opinion in the school desegregation case Milliken v. Bradley (1974).
Historian Bench Ansfield’s insightful new book Born in Flames (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025) examines a particularly grotesque historical manifestation of these forces in order to cut through the abstraction and reveal the heart of the profiteering and cruelty within. The book relates the awful history of the arson-for-profit wave of the 1970s, a criminal plot that was the source of enormous windfalls for insurers and landlord co-conspirators. These arson schemes resulted in hundreds of deaths and the destruction of thousands of housing units. New York City’s Bronx neighborhood was a primary target, and Ansfield centers their analysis on its example. In doing so, Ansfield unveils the racial ideologies that, then as now, scaffold the purportedly impartial, often inaccessibly byzantine world of high finance. Though far more damaging than the fires of the 1960s-era urban uprisings (much-decried at the time), the arson wave of the 1970s has been less remarked-upon. Rather than evoking the stirring symbolism of Black rebellion, these fires testify only to the moral hideousness of the exploiters. And yet, when it’s referenced at all, the burning of the Bronx is typically remembered as the venal work of slimy, absentee landlords, or is otherwise wrongly pathologized as the result of “crimes of passion” undertaken by disaffected or disturbed Black and Puerto Rican men.
Instead, beneath the heaps of ashes, Ansfield writes, lies a sprawling, systematic profit scheme conducted with the full knowledge of the many complicit: the “untold history of the racially stratified property insurance market.” Recasting the story as one of state-sanctioned white-collar crime, Ansfield details how financialization, together with and the insurance industry’s capacity to transmute racial animus into calculable “risk,” made it perversely profitable for multiple entities, landlords and insurers alike, to engineer the systematic commission of arson, destroying insured buildings in redlined neighborhoods like the Bronx and knowingly risking—and taking—numerous lives. It is a particularly vivid example of the contraposition of profit and human life, seething with intrinsic racial dynamics, that characterizes the incentive structures of capitalism.