Who Decides Who Belongs—And Who Gets Erased? A Discussion on Housing and Belonging With Filmmaker Derrick Benton and Sociologist Jerome Krase

Filmmaker Derrick Benton explores the politics of belonging through the lens of his documentary The House That Love Built. Beginning with his family’s story in 1980s Brooklyn, Benton traces how housing policy, administrative systems, and everyday bureaucracy shape not only where people live, but whether they are recognized as fully human within civic life and how narratives are constructed, who controls them, and what it means to reclaim authorship over one’s own history. Derrick Benton is a Brooklyn-born filmmaker and writer whose work spans documentary and narrative film. He is the founder of F.R.E.E. Studios (Filming Real Emotional Experiences), a production studio dedicated to community-rooted storytelling and cultural critique. His films explore memory, identity, and the ways institutions shape lived experience. Alongside his film work, Derrick publishes essays on power, belonging, and media through The Stooop. Jerome Krase, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and the Murray Koppelman Professor at Brooklyn College, is an activist-scholar who works with public and private agencies regarding urban community issues. His self- and co-authored books include Self and Community in the City (1982), Ethnicity and Machine Politics (1992), Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society (1994), Race and Ethnicity in New York City (2005) Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World (2006), Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class (2012), Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn (2016), COVID-19 in Brooklyn (2022), and forthcoming Local and Global Impacts of the War in Ukraine. He co-edits Urbanities and serves on the editorial boards of Visual Studies and the Journal of Video Ethnography. Krase has twice served a Fulbright Specialist, is an officer of ProBonoDesign Inc, and active in many American, European, and international sociological associations, the Commission on Urban Anthropology, American Italian Historical Association, International Urban Symposium, H-NET Humanities…