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UCMerced

How to Kill a Neighborhood and Make a Profit

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Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap
DC Preservation League

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

In this presentation, Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza explains 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. She describes 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. She also explores how DC came to be the nation’s “Murder Capital” and incarceration capital, and why it’s now one of the most gentrified cities in the country. 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, healthcare, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. This talk unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities. Tanya Golash-Boza is the founder of the Racism, Capitalism, and the Law Lab, a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, and the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center. She is a prolific scholar, with several published books and dozens of academic articles and book chapters. She has received several awards, including the Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award from the Latino/a Studies Section of the American Sociological Association for her book, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism – published by New York University Press in 2015. Her textbook, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, published by Oxford University Press, is now in its third edition and is the leading textbook in this field. Her latest book, Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap will be released by the University of California Press in July 2023. Follow Dr. Golash-Boza on Twitter @tanyaboza or on YouTube @TanyaGolashBoza . You can also visit her project website, "Mapping Gentrification in Washington, D.C." at this address: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/009773cc5c224421a66d1ce9ff089849. For more information on the DC Preservation League, visit our website www.dcpreservation.org or follow us on social media @DCPresLeague. If you have a specific comment, question or concern please email info@dcpreservation.org.

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