Explore our city’s upcoming humanities events from performances and lectures to celebrations and multi-media experiences. These public events are created and hosted by either HumanitiesDC, our grantees or local partners. To submit an event for consideration, please complete this form.

« All Events

This event has passed.

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

Name: Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap
Start: 2023-01-25T12:00:00-04:00
End: 2023-01-25T13:00:00-04:00

January 25, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Free

In this presentation, Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza will explain 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 will describe 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 will also explore 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 will unveil a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.