Draws a direct line between
redlining, incarceration, and gentrification in an American city.
This
book shows 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. In Before Gentrification,
Tanya Maria 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 is 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. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of
anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for
all US cities.
