This essay addresses how race-liberal U.S. social scientists helped shore up the nation and an ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism by translating such crises into the geoeconomic commensurabilities at the heart of a universalist U.S. nationalism and U.S.-led international finance.

In conversation with Black and Caribbean Studies intellect and poetics, we first problematize how dominant ways of writing about black harm not only reproduce anti-black violence but also neglect the desires of quiet sovereignty in the experience of harm. Second, we re-story Leticia’s sociality as immanent and acostumbrarse as a collective politics of perseverance that ebbs and flows in this hydro-sociality.

The authors seek to trouble the rigidity of relations of domination so often portrayed in critical property studies, instead bringing to light the tenuousness, ambiguity, and messiness of the property-racial matrix, and the forms of resistance and refusal that render imaginative futures beyond property. It is one of the chief contentions of this special issue that while they may seem hegemonic and fixed, racial regimes of property are inherently unstable, constantly subject to undoing through and beyond their own internal logics.

Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants’ rights. The racial limits of tenants’ rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city.

Drawing on findings from an analysis of nearly 10,000 postwar property records in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, this article demonstrates that vacancy stems not from disinvestment but from predatory and hyperextractive investments in housing that derive economic feasibility and legal sanction from property’s historical articulation with race.