As more explicit examples of bigotry were discouraged—e.g., expressions of interpersonal hatred, or more overt and literal forms like Jim Crow—racism remained alive and well wherever it could persist in even the flimsiest disguise. When discriminatory outcomes emerged from more abstracted structural processes (whether perpetuating existing forms of exploitation and tacit segregation or mutating into new ones as opportunities arose), the defenders of the still-unequal status quo found that they could easily defer to a pretense of deniability. The result was that systems or policies that produced racially unequal outcomes could be absolved, legally sustained, and naturalized, so long as their discriminatory effects were cloaked in putatively neutral concepts: terms like “property rights,” “choice,” “risk,” and “public safety.”

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 bookBorn 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.

Ansfield’s historical analysis is a deeply valuable one in that it so strikingly illuminates the mechanisms of racial difference and subjugation that underlie seemingly “universal” or “race-neutral” systems of accumulation. “The fires tell a story of the transliteration of race into the language of risk,” they write, “of financial abstractions made tangible in the char of the roof and the scald of the hand.” Just as importantly, though, is Ansfield’s exploration of how the flames were eventually extinguished, which offers one of the more lucid accounts of the extraordinary degree of organized community effort necessary to stop racialized depredation when it shows up in our neighborhoods. Ansfield is careful not to overstate or fetishize community victories in this regard—as they note, the quashing of arson-for-profit still left Bronx residents struggling to rebuild amid continued redlining in housing and insurance. (To this day, they write, the insurance industry remains premised upon a “lethal alchemy of race and capitalism.”)

But the story of Bronx residents’ successful campaign against arson-for-profit demonstrates the importance of both ongoing community resistance and the construction of a robust regulatory apparatus that uses state power to eliminate or limit private industry’s capacity to exploit and profit from the group-differentiated devaluing of human life. At a time when a new ostensibly progressive (but fundamentally neoliberal and right-wing-aligned) “Abundance” movement revives age-old calls to strip regulation from private industry, Ansfield’s text reasserts the underlying violence of this approach. All too often, deregulation, Born in Flames suggests, fuels not innovation and distribution but dispossession and death.

That is, if they were even allowed to purchase a policy in the first place. At the time, urban neighborhoods were also being subjected to a wave of insurance redlining—using measures analogous to the more well-known story of mortgage redlining, insurers singled out “risky” areas (which were always Black or non-white) and denied them coverage. Whether confining people of color to enormously expensive insurance plans or blocking them from access outright, the insurance industry made it more difficult for urban landlords to afford maintenance and procure loans for repairs, contributing to the post-war deterioration of cities and the creation of hazardous living conditions for predominantly non-white working-class tenants.

The urban rebellions of the 1960s deepened insurers’ dual racial regime of extortion and refusal. An uprising-induced “racialized panic” over purported claims losses—in large part manufactured, Ansfield suggests, by just one “hyperbolic” LondonTimes story—prompted Lloyd’s of London, which provided reinsurance (essentially, insurance for the insurers) for 30 percent of the U.S. insurance market, to cease their coverage. Spooked by Lloyd’s’ exit, U.S. insurers pulled back on the already small amount of property insurance available in U.S. cities. Critically, Ansfield demonstrates the fictive nature of these fears, highlighting how racial preconceptions can inflect financial dynamics.

In fact, Ansfield finds, insurers’ losses from urban uprisings were massively exaggerated. But the rebellions upended insurers’ understanding of risk, which tracked their racialized presumptions and fears. Assuming that Black revolt would continue “for the foreseeable future,” insurers intensified the “actuarial retribution” they were already inflicting on properties in predominantly Black and/or non-white communities. Ansfield’s dissection of this “recalibration of the racialized risk” offers a clarifying look at racial capitalism in action, breaking down the often-invisible processes through which “racial hierarchy and the imperatives of capitalism” are interlaced.

Amid this industry-made crisis of uninsurance, insurers turned to the state for salvation. What they sought, Ansfield explains, was twofold. First, they desired something “tantamount to a federal bailout,” a form of government-backed security that would protect them from “uprising-related losses” now that Lloyd’s had “retreated.” At the same time, too much government investigation into private insurance would expose the industry’s rampant redlining, promising a public relations disaster. So the industry sought to “wrest control of the regulatory wheel and steer national policy itself.” Their aims were to both consolidate government support and, as civil rights proponents intensified their demands for equal opportunity, to preserve the industry’s reputation intact.

The vehicle of these efforts was a newly formed (and far less publicized) state body that was effectively a spin-off of the Kerner Commission: the President’s National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas, also known as the Hughes Panel. The Panel reached what Ansfield calls a “grand bargain”: if the government provided federal reinsurance, insurers would end—or so they promised—their practice of insurance redlining in “riot-affected areas.” Additionally, the Commission created a public-private insurance company called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR), the purpose of which was to help mitigate exploitation, most significantly by amending the years-long exclusion of urban property owners from property insurance coverage.

On the surface, FAIR plans appear revelatory, even meaningfully antiracist. As a form of “actuarial ‘affirmative action’ for properties […] relegated to the residual market and thus disqualified from accessing insurance at reasonable rates,” FAIR plans barred redlining. But the devil was in the details. While hypothetically FAIR plans indicated a shift away from redlining, they also fell “short of what so-called greenlining promised.” Terming this dynamic “brownlining,” Ansfield explains how the FAIR plans provided insurance to Bronx property owners but only on “discriminatory terms.”

In practice, FAIR plans did not upend the racially tiered insurance market. In fact, they helped etch racial inequality deeper into the metropolitan landscape. Because FAIR plan rates were determined not by “industry-wide loss experience,” which was typical in the voluntary market, but rather “solely on the pool’s own loss experience,” FAIR plan rates were exorbitant compared to those in the voluntary market—typically four to five times higher. A pernicious variant of what Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor has called “predatory inclusion,” FAIR plans—despite their ostensible role as an “antidote to redlining”—in fact made insurance accessible on “unfavorable terms.” Making matters worse, FAIR plans lacked any incentives or disciplinary mechanisms that could either incline or force policyholders to maintain their properties, further catalyzing cycles of neglect and decay. It was nothing short of “Jim Crow, insurance-style,” Ansfield writes.

It was not until FAIR plans became the primary form of coverage in urban neighborhoods that the Bronx began to go up in flames. The problem began with what Ansfield calls an “insurance gap”: the “asymmetry” between a building’s higher valuation by insurers operating through predatory FAIR plans and its lower valuation by redlined mortgage markets. Under these circumstances, it simply became more profitable for landlords to burn their properties down, rather than fix up or sell them. In one property, Ansfield reports, the selling price was $5,000, while its insured value was up to $250,000—a gap “as much as fifty times the building’s valuation by the primary mortgage market.” In other words, by over-insuring properties with low property values, FAIR plan underwriters such as New York’s Property Insurance Underwriting Association (NYPIUA) effectively encouraged landlords to cash in by collecting their arson insurance.

It might seem strange that NYPIUA could sustain such extensive losses. What was in it for the insurers? A massive “financial windfall,” it turns out. The key, Ansfield explains, was a “quiet revolution” in insurance that occurred as part of the broader ascent of 1970s-era financialization. Whereas insurers once profited through managing the “ratio of losses to premiums earned,” they now maximized profits by “investing customer premiums in money markets, corporate and government bonds, mortgages, stocks, and other investments.”

This “shift towards financialization,” in concert with the high interest rates in place throughout the 1970s, meant that insurers could make the bulk of their profits through “inhaling premiums” and investing them. No longer concerned about higher losses or, relatedly, about the actual state of the properties they insured, insurers like the NYPIUA happily absorbed the costs from the arson wave and, in so doing, effectively encouraged the practice. For Bronx tenants, Ansfield writes, “the fate of their homes had been overdetermined by an insurance gap that made these buildings most valuable after they had gone up in flames.”

Eventually, private industry became envious of NYPIUA’s price gouging and reentered the Bronx’s insurance market. Though this may have at first appeared to be a beneficial reversal of insurance redlining, in practice, the emergence of a private market in the Bronx merely entrapped Bronx residents in another form of subprime insurance .Private industry sold them coverage in what’s called the excess and surplus (E&S) line market, which not only over-charged them but “had a reputation for shady dealings and poor oversight.” Soon, this “surplus of insurance capital” prompted what Ansfield calls the “industrialization” of arson-for-profit schemes, where a number of “vertically integrated enterprises,” or arson “rings,” involving landlords, real estate agents, government employees, and insurance underwriters and adjusters, collaborated to secure even larger payouts.

And so up in flames these properties went; not uncommonly, innocent lives went with them. Emphasizing the human toll wrought upon Bronx residents, Ansfield shares harrowing details about how families suffered during the Bronx’s arson era. Ansfield describes how children went to bed fully dressed, with shoes on, in case they had to flee a fire in the night. Sleep deprivation was common, with Bronx residents kept awake by a constant stream of screeching fire engines, stress-induced insomnia, or the terror and strain of actual emergency escapes. Many faced cycles of property loss and displacement. In some cases, survivors sustained damaging burns. Others simply did not make it out in time.

As Ansfield makes clear, these lives, lost to history, were devalued and discarded—deemed acceptable losses by a hydra-headed racial economy monomaniacally bent on squeezing profits from any possible source, up to and including the premature deaths of children and other innocents. This history of “financialization from the ground up” removes the protective cloak of abstraction and impersonalization from which globalized networks of high finance benefit. By elucidating the direct linkages between structural policy and on-the-ground harms, Ansfield makes a compelling case that these industries are guilty of not only grotesque profiteering, but social murder—directly implicating the suited men in corner offices who quietly orchestrated the racialized plunder of the Bronx. Ansfield offers one of the clearest explanations of how racism is reproduced and naturalized by capitalism. Racism is so thoroughly enmeshed in the structures of capitalism and bound up in cyclical processes of mutual reinforcement that the two patterns are effectively inextricable.

A recurring thread in Ansfield’s analysis is the insidious ways that racialized violence became even more abstracted through the twinned transformations of financialized capitalism and the shifting political boundaries around race that accompanied the legislative successes of the Civil Rights era. Because the racial ideologies structuring the insurance industry’s capital accumulation are officially deracialized and subsumed within capitalism’s institutional design, their activities appear legitimate within a civil-rights legal regime that defines racism through the narrow framework of individual bias and intent. Once capital’s role in producing racially unequal outcomes had been obscured, Ansfield shows, the Bronx’s arson waves—and Bronx residents’ subsequent immiseration—were readily incorporated into longstanding racial scripts about Black and brown working class irresponsibility and criminality.

Clouded by accusations of racial pathology that appealed to a growing and bipartisan conservatism, the cultural narrative around the Bronx fires masked the insurance industry’s transgressions, fueled complaints about the Civil Rights movement’s “excesses,” and appeared to offer “evidence” of urban Black and brown criminality. As Ansfield writes, “when fire is naturalized on the basis of race, the why no longer demands an answer.”

Ansfield’s attention to the “triangulated” interplay between tenant and community organizations, the state, and insurance companies offers an especially enlightening look into what it actually takes to upend the plunderous forms of capitalist accumulation and the unequal power arrangements they sustain. Certainly, Ansfield makes clear, we cannot rely upon the consciences of state or corporate actors to disturb the flow of profits: only relentless, coordinated community organizing and protest can force political transformation.

Yet Ansfield is also refreshingly honest about the fact that, while community movements “played a pivotal role in suppressing the arson wave,” they “could not singlehandedly keep out a threat that was built into the financial foundations of the Bronx’s brownlined neighborhoods.” Disrupting the financial infrastructure that made arson profitable, Ansfield suggests, “was a role only state and corporate actors could perform.” It was, in other words, only aggressive state intervention, prompted by community agitation, that ultimately neutralized the financial incentives that made committing arson-for-profit so remunerative.

The community victory over arson-for-profit began with individuals like Genevieve Brooks. A Black mother and tenant living in the Bronx, Brooks had launched a daycare center to fill the gap in youth-oriented programming in the neighborhood. She soon became disturbed by the fires’ disruption of children’s sleep, which prompted her and her community to “look at the housing crisis.” Despite frustrating dismissals from the fire department, which blamed the fires on “junkies,” she organized a “community anti-arson organization” that attempted to document the blazes and raise public awareness about the fires via postering and other forms of community outreach. “We knew that arson was for profit,” she recalled. “[I]t wasn’t that a junkie went to sleep in a building. [I]t was a wholesale business for everybody.”

After a short-lived Bronx Arson Task Force was disbanded, Bronx clergy would also begin a concurrent pressure campaign that eventually secured a meeting with District Attorney Mario Merola, where they made the case that the blazes originated with arson-for-profit schemes. Merola genuinely took up the cause, and while many of his initial efforts, including getting the FBI to intervene, proved unsuccessful, he became the first public official to link the NYPIUA to the high rates of arson, which created the pressure necessary to “[prompt] a reckoning” within the NYPIUA. They soon became a “leader in the fight against arson,” chiefly by sharpening their standards for insurability, which Ansfield notes was “pivotal in slowing the arson wave.”

The campaign continued to amass momentum. But the real tipping point came with the July 1977 New York City blackout, which was instrumental in bringing the arson-for-profit crisis to the attention of the public. During the infamous 24 hours of city-wide power loss, arsons and looting erupted in all five boroughs, with “hot spots” across the south Bronx.” In this instance, arson-for-profit schemes were likely not the driving factor behind the fires–their origins less concretely traceable, Ansfield draws on scholars who read them more as working-class community rebellion against New York’s regime of austerity. But they ultimately generated the “political will” necessary to combat the “years-long conflagration” that long beset the Bronx.. In particular, increasingly bad press about insurance industry complicity in arson-for-profit schemes—reporting that was prompted, Ansfield makes clear, by community awareness campaigns and tenant organizing efforts that defined the scope and stakes of the issue—created an “optics problem” for insurers.

Fearful that such scandals would draw greater federal scrutiny and potentially regulation, property insurers hastened to implement a number of anti-arson protections. Though undoubtedly self-serving, their anti-arson efforts also “proved decisive,” Ansfield notes, and rates of arson dropped precipitously after 1977.

The state also took action. Following “cues from tenant mobilization on the ground,” the New York State Assembly passed tax lien legislation in 1977. By allowing unpaid taxes to be taken out of insurance payouts before they reached landlords, the legislation helped undermine landlords’ ability to profit from insurance payouts. In a more direct confrontation, in 1978, the city created New York’s Arson Strike Force (ASF). The ASF—whose research arm was staffed by a tenacious group of 14 elderly “anti-arson zealots” operating “million-dollar IBM 370 terminals,” a particularly charming image—used sophisticated research methods to develop an Arson Risk Prediction Index (ARPI), which could predict with 80 percent accuracy “whether a building would be torched.” Once a building was flagged as a likely site for arson, the owner received a note from the ASF that their property was “under surveillance.”

Here, partnership with tenant and block associations was crucial, Ansfield notes, calling this cooperation the “central pillar of its operations.” Neighborhood groups’ access to the ARPI proved critical for mobilizing effective community action against arson (such as by instituting block patrols); it also aided in building larger campaigns to lobby for state and national legislation. Soon after, the NYPIUA joined forces with the ASF, leading the former to reduce their rates and implement tighter underwriting standards that further stemmed the wave of arson in the Bronx. By the end of the decade, the New York State Assembly passed a law that forced the NYPIUA to cease their rate gouging. “Almost overnight,” Ansfield writes, “the exorbitant rates of the brownlining era were brought in line with the voluntary market.”

Abundance brands itself as a “liberalism that builds,” compared to the putatively slow, bureaucracy-riddled form of government that its proponents contend hampers real change today. In particular, Klein and Thompson argue that the problem is too much regulation, which, by making the “burden of compliance” too “overwhelming” for private developers, has hampered quicker housing and infrastructure development.

Yet, as Ansfield’s book makes clear, an aggressively deregulatory environment, particularly in the Abundists’ favorite policy realm of housing, portends not innovation and expedited growth but extreme neighborhood abandonment and property destruction. It was not regulatory overreach, as the Abundance boosters might have it, that helped facilitate the Bronx’s devastating arson wave. Rather, it was government deregulation of private insurance that allowed insurers to seek out and capitalize on perverse financial arrangements that extracted profits from the Bronx’s devastation. Like all capitalists, the property insurers in Ansfield’s history were driven by the pursuit of profits, a process that is enabled by the exploitation of racial difference.

As abhorrent and destructive as it was, the Bronx arson wave represents only one limited manifestation of these forces; similar avenues of exploitation thoroughly permeate the socioeconomic order. Making it easier for private industry to direct the provision of infrastructure and social services, as the Abundance movement ultimately aims to do, will not lead to a grand egalitarian distribution of resources. Rather, it will enable further racialized plunder, facilitating the creation of mercenary subprime markets that enrich corporate elites on the backs of working-class communities of color.

So long as the capitalist and hyper-financialized infrastructure of modern insurance remained intact, the fight to end arson-for-profit in the Bronx was fated to remain incomplete. Yet Ansfield’s book still offers a radically refreshing reminder that—with coordinated, nimble, and creative community struggle—much can still be won, and relief from racial capitalism’s most pernicious effects can be halted and even eliminated from the urban landscape. To be sure, Ansfield likely (and correctly) would resist characterizing the successful anti-arson organizing as revolutionary in nature; the initiatives that were most effective in stemming the growth of the flames, namely the ASF, were ultimately a form of law enforcement that worked not only with fire but also with police officials.

The point, though, is not to use these histories as one-to-one models for how to organize against today’s capitalist behemoth, which is endlessly self-transforming (today exhibiting a trajectory towards a new condition of inequality that resembles an ascendant techno-fascism). Rather, the narratives of struggle must be kept alive so that we might never forget—even in the face of the overwhelming berations of our culture, which implore us to give up, to accept that change will never come—that political power inheres in the people. They must only choose to wield it. Power can and has been organized, wrested from elites, and channeled towards what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “life-affirming institutions.”

Indeed, a provocative undercurrent within Ansfield’s book is that even as the U.S. state enables racialized violence and extraction, it can also serve as an efficacious site for waging meaningful struggle and intervention against that very violence. Ansfield, following Gilmore, suggests the utility of “go[ing] deeply into the state in all its aspects, […] its budget process, its inner contradictions, its intrastate antagonisms and fictions,” where people can “set their feet to fight the fight.” Without deluding ourselves into thinking this work will be absent of real perils—state capture and reformism always stalk—the history of the Bronx’s arson wave demonstrates that wielding power to demand a more just world is not only possible but winnable in our lifetimes. ♦