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: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap (U California Press, 2023), Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped ... Show More
Aug 1
Vaneesa Cook, "Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks" (Beacon Press, 2026)
In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and e ... Show More
46m 16s
Jul 31
Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and the Role of State-led Rural Urbanization: Narratives, Meaning Making, and the Puzzle of Social Stability" (Würzberg UP, 2025)
As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes ... Show More
1h 16m
Jul 30
Jinwon Kim, "Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand" (NYU Press, 2026)
How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K-Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular des ... Show More
34m 41s
Mar 2023
Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022)
In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to reb ... Show More
51m 54s
Aug 2024
Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022)
Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design.
Men, ... Show More
1h 12m
Jun 2020
How structural racism shaped LA, and what developers can do about it
Redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal, and building freeways through communities of color are all ways Los Angeles was shaped by structural racism. Now gentrification is a challenge. Real estate development consultant Judith Taylor explains how race has shaped place, an ... Show More
17m 27s
Sep 2016
The Dangers Of Life As An American 'Nobody'
Marc Lamont Hill untangles the decades of dysfunction that have led to recent racial flash-points in his latest book, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. He talks with Gene Demby about the book, and his support for one particu ... Show More
24m 34s
May 2021
The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street
May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, works as a shoeshine in the predominantly white downtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On his break, he goes into a nearby office building to use the restroom, and gets on the elevator. Sarah Page, a white teenager, is the elevator operator. Wh ... Show More
25m 16s
Mar 2023
Roger Biles and Mark H. Rose, "A Good Place to Do Business: The Politics of Downtown Renewal Since 1945" (Temple UP, 2022)
The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations ho ... Show More
1h 1m