Successful black homeowners are exceptional cases, not products of an equitable system.

Evidence

Look at the families in this chapter who’ve managed to buy and keep their homes. The Browns pursued their dream with significant financial help from a white family—and the luck of having very good tenants. John and his wife suffered a huge setback, and ultimately chose to be a minority in their neighborhood for the sake of financial security and the promise of a better future for their children. And Mary Hancock and her husband got the house she wanted, with help from a community organization, and still found themselves vulnerable to real estate trends driven by white buyers. Yet each of them has been fortunate in a way that most black Americans are not. Black exceptionalism, not an equitable system, underlies the success of those in the black community who manage to wrestle some degree of wealth from homeownership. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 247

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘black exceptionalism’ as a named concept distinguishing individual successes from a systematically rigged market.