Where Do You Live? How Did You Get There? Housing Segregation in America with Dr. Rashad Shabazz

Jan. 12 at 6:00 PM (Virtual)

Everybody needs a place to live, but not everyone gets to live where they want to. Who lives in your neighborhood? Who doesn’t live in your neighborhood? For many decades American cities have been divided by race. This was not caused indirectly by individual or organizational actions or prejudices, but deliberately through laws and policies of local, state and federal governments. Today we can see how a long history of discriminatory housing policies has determined who can purchase and own homes, and where people can live. Beginning in the 1930s, color-coded maps drawn along racial lines, a practice known as redlining, became a tool to regulate who could qualify for home loans. More recently, subprime mortgage practices that targeted minority borrowers leading up to the 2008 housing crisis have continued to define access to homeownership by race. How do these policies impact our lives and communities? Join us for an interactive discussion on the history of housing segregation in the U.S. and its lasting impact on the geography of our cities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Rashad Shabazz is Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation and the School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning at Arizona State University. His teaching and research include race relations, social justice movements, and the relationship of race and place. He is the expert on how race, sexuality, and gender are informed by geography. With an interdisciplinary approach, his academic work brings together human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. Dr. Shabazz’s most recent book publication, Spatializing Blackness (2015), examines the impact of carceral power on the geographies of African Americans in Chicago’s South Side.

This program series is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.