AAAS Guest Lecture: Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza

The Department of African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) welcomes UMD faculty, students, and guests to join this John B. Slaughter Endowment Lecture featuring Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza, the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. 

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.

If you cannot attend in-person, you can join virtually via Zoom