Date/Time
Date(s) - February 19, 2025
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Location
LSC 376-378, Lory Student Center

Categories No Categories

Join us for the first of three Sociology-in-Progress Community Gatherings this spring.

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

Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza

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 “Murder 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.

Tanya Golash-Boza is the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center and a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She has authored or edited eight books including: Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (NYU 2016), Forced out Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field (Oxford 2018), and Before Gentrification (University of California 2023).