Race Brokers is available for purchase at Oxford University Press, IndieBound, Amazon, and other local bookstores! It was released on April 2, 2021.

Awards: Winner, Community & Urban Sociology Section Book Award (2023, American Sociological Association); Winner, Zelizer Award for Best Book in Economic Sociology (2023, American Sociological Association)

Reviews: City & Community; Journal of the American Planning Association; Social Forces

New Books Network Podcast Interview

(with host, Dr. Richard Ocejo)

Praise for Race Brokers:

“Race Brokers lays bare the everyday processes of residential segregation in the 21st century. Korver-Glenn shows how, more than a half-century after the Fair Housing Act, real estate professionals still actively promote segregation. Yet, Korver-Glenn also reveals that these professionals can engage in anti-racist practices that could, over time and at scale, weaken segregation’s grip. Race Brokers is thus both troubling and heartening—a must-read for all committed to housing justice.” –Monica C. Bell, Yale University

 “Korver-Glenn’s book is a tour de force—a timely, articulate, and compelling study of the continued effects of subtle and not-so-subtle forms of racism in the maintenance of residential segregation. By documenting the ways in which real estate agents utilize and reinforce racial hierarchies, and apply racialized notions to people and places alike, Korver-Glenn illuminates the role of racism in contemporary residential dynamics and helps to dispel the myth of segregation as a natural or inevitable byproduct of color-blind economic forces. This is a must-read for those interested in understanding modern processes of racial stratification.” –Kyle Crowder, University of Washington

“Race Brokers offers the most comprehensive examination—to date—of how racial inequality is intentionally reproduced in the housing market by a wide range of actors. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn’s insightful juxtaposition of racism brokers with racism breakers provides critical new frames for understanding the contestation of the color line in 21st Century America.” –Jacob William Faber, New York University

“Korver-Glenn has pulled back the curtain on the entire real estate industry, shining a brilliant ethnographic spotlight on every stage of the homebuying process, revealing industry practices to be both a legacy of yesterday’s explicitly racist policies and a continuation of today’s ongoing racist frameworks.  She shows how all of these come together to systematically recreate segregation, one sale at a time. Race Brokers ingeniously draws on the lessons of industry actors who are both anti-racist and successful to offer refreshing and concrete ideas about industry practices and governmental policies that could change these routines and break the cycle.” –Maria Krysan, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Race Brokers is such an important intervention into our current understandings of both housing segregation and racial dynamics more generally.  Offering a deep and penetrating ethnography, of the real estate industry, Korver Glenn shows us the informal and formal logics, practices, and policies that collectively create racially inequitable housing markets and that fundamentally shape what our neighborhoods look like." –Amanda Lewis, Director, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago

Kinder Institute Urban Reads Program