Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?

Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette respond, “Let them eat cake”? No, but the line captures the aristocracy’s witlessness. Patrick Henry probably never said “Give me liberty, or give me death,” either.

The second game of the 1977 World Series, at Yankee Stadium, provided another such occasion. It was a time of crushing austerity for New York City; tens of thousands of municipal employees had been laid off, including firefighters. These woes were background to the game, but they flashed into the foreground when a fire in an abandoned elementary school lit up the skies just blocks away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer Howard Cosell famously but never actually said, “the Bronx is burning.”

Indeed, it was. “It seemed like just every second there was a fire,” Darney (K-Born) Rivers, a local rapper, later recalled. “I’m talking about every block you went on.” Families kept suitcases by the door; children were told to wear shoes to bed.

To some, this was a tragic turn in the country’s racial drama. White people left cities for the suburbs, taking jobs and tax revenues with them. Black people, trapped in neighborhoods that felt increasingly like holding pens, revolted. The Watts uprising of 1965, in Los Angeles, incinerated hundreds of buildings. The fires continued. The historian Elizabeth Hinton, in “America on Fire” (2021), counts 1,949 urban insurgencies between May, 1968, and December, 1972.

Those uprisings subsided in the early seventies, yet the fires kept going. Bill Moyers, Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, made an award-winning documentary, “The Fire Next Door” (1977), about Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the South Bronx. “Burning buildings are as common here as broken dreams,” he intoned. The arsonists he highlighted included addicts, welfare cheats, and kids setting fires just “for the hell of it.” This was, Moyers felt, “a society out of control.”

That was an unfair characterization. The South Bronx was also a fount of artistic fecundity, where poets, musicians, artists, and dancers created hip-hop. The art grew amid the fires, a boisterous eruption of life in deadly surroundings. “Throw your hands in the air, and wave ’em like you just don’t care,” Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three instructed. Yet fire singed even that carefree party anthem, which ended with an ominous chant: “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.”

Conservatives saw all this as the devolution of post-Watts rioting into utter lawlessness. But was that diagnosis right? The South Bronx, the arson capital, hadn’t seen much upheaval. And although urban unrest had often burst forth from public-housing developments, the projects in the Bronx were virtually flameproof. As a report from the Bronx District Attorney’s office observed, the New York City Housing Authority provided residences for 169,663 families as of January, 1977, yet saw an “almost total absence of fires.”

The Bronx firestorm was selective not just in which buildings burned but in how they did so. The typical Bronx walkup was built of brick and concrete. A fire might not do much damage unless it burned the roof, in which case water would total the building. Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three proved to be keen students of pyrodynamics, because it was often the roof that caught fire. It was as if someone were trying to do as much damage as possible to privately owned—but not publicly owned—rental properties.

“In the community, we knew that landlords were burning their buildings,” the educator Vivian Vázquez Irizarry has said. This was an open secret, reported at the time and arising even in Moyers’s documentary. It made little dent on public consciousness, though. “When I first moved to New York,” the writer Ian Frazier remembers, “I assumed, as many people did, that the poverty and fires in the Bronx were just the way the Bronx was.”

In 2018, Vázquez and Gretchen Hildebran released a documentary, “Decade of Fire,” that exonerated the Bronx. Now a historian who worked on that documentary, Bench Ansfield, has published a formidable book, “Born in Flames” (Norton). The fires were set not by unruly tenants, Ansfield charges, but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. The late twentieth century gave rise to a horrifying dynamic, throughout the country but especially in the South Bronx, whereby owners had reason to burn their buildings and few people in power had reason to care.

The thought of cities burning in a racial reckoning has long haunted the American imagination. The era of slavery was also the age of wood, and nearly every major slave rebellion and conspiracy involved arson. In one of the most fearsome plots, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, rebels allegedly planned to burn down Charleston.

It was easy to understand why slaves might torch cities. But the fires emerging in the mid-sixties, just as the civil-rights movement was racking up victories, were harder to interpret. Were they protests? Meltdowns? Crimes? As arson and violence convulsed Black neighborhoods, white support for the movement plummeted.

To conservatives, this was vindication. In an influential essay, “Looting and Liberal Racism” (1977), Midge Decter argued that New York’s racial liberalism had done nothing for Black and brown people other than convince them that there were “virtually no crimes” for which they’d be held accountable. Riots fed law-and-order conservatism.

Of course, there were other views. “This ain’t no riot, brother, this is a rebellion,” the Black Power activist H. Rap Brown declared in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1967. Which is to say, the people in the streets weren’t riffraff running amok but activists with aims. The problem was white violence, Brown explained, and, if it didn’t stop, Black people should “burn this town down.” About an hour after Brown made that speech, as if to prove his point, police shot him. (He lived.)

Historians have come around to his view. Gerald Horne’s “The Fire This Time” (1995), Peter B. Levy’s “The Great Uprising” (2018), Hinton’s “America on Fire,” and, most recently, Ashley Howard’s “Midwest Unrest” treat the tumult as a purposeful, even admirable revolt against racism. Yet these histories focus on the uprisings that wound down by 1972, not on the harder-to-explain fires that followed. Hinton, in another book, briefly connects the Bronx fires to Black revolts—both stemmed from excessive policing and incarceration, she says—but leaves it there.

Ansfield offers a tidier solution. The fires of 1964-72 constituted an uprising, yes. But not the subsequent fires. Those were neither riot nor rebellion but something else: “racial capitalism.”

That term, “racial capitalism,” entered American discourse in 1983—via the political scientist Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism”—but came into vogue with the Black Lives Matter movement. The idea is that racial oppression is essential to capitalism. So, to take a stark but characteristic example from the historian Walter Johnson, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was “founded upon the capacity of enslaved women’s bodies” to maintain the supply of Black labor. Rape and forced family separation weren’t unfortunate by-products but “elementary aspects” of the system. This grim structure has varied with time, yet its fundamentals—economic predation, white supremacy—remain intact. “The temporality of racial capitalism,” the historians Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy write, “is one of ongoingness.”

Ansfield brings this expansive vision to the Bronx, following the trail from the arsonists who did the torching to the landlords who ordered it, the policymakers who enabled it, the financiers who encouraged it, and the insurers who paid for it. The Bronx’s fire-prone tenements were dirt cheap, yet wealthy investors in several countries held stakes in them.