Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap

This talk will show how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class. Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation’s “M**der Capital” and incarceration capital, and why it’s now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first.

Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza is founder of the Racism, Capitalism, and the Law (RCL) Lab, a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, and the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center. She has spent her scholarly career working to understand why racial and economic disparities exist, how racism intersects with capitalism, and how our legal system upholds these inequities. She is the author of over 50 academic articles and six books. Her latest book, which was awarded the Robert E. Park Book Award of the Community and Urban Studies Section of ASA, is Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap.

Tanya Golash-Boza’s public outreach includes her blog, Get a Life, PhD, which has over 4.5 million pageviews and OpEds and other essays which have appeared in Al Jazeera, The Boston Review, The Nation, Newsweek, The Houston Chronicle, and, The Chronicle of Higher Education. For this and other outreach work, Professor Golash-Boza was awarded the UC Merced Senate Faculty Award for Distinguished Scholarly Public Service in 2013 and the UC Merced Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship in 2019.

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