The Danger Zone is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth argues that residential racial segregation is both an economic injustice and a public health hazard. It contends that housing insecurity and its attendant health consequences make up key components of an unjust, destructive, and deadly racial order.
It explains how these dire racist injustices are effects of practices that might appear initially to be race neutral, such as decisions about zoning and construction of municipal and school district boundaries. Health and housing injustices cannot be remedied by any single law, public policy, medical practice, or technological fix. They require the creation of an active and engaged multi-sphere public mobilization that recruits people to invent and implement new democratic practices in many different arenas. The Danger Zone is Everywhere calls attention to the profound wisdom and powerful achievements of grass roots fair housing groups, health and healing arts collectives, environmental justice initiatives, community land trusts, autonomous learning circles, and community co-operative ventures.
About the speaker
George Lipsitz is Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, How Racism Takes Place, A Life in the Struggle, and Insubordinate Spaces (with Barbara Tomlinson). Lipsitz co-authored with the Alliance for California Traditional Arts the book Saludarte: Building Health Equity on the Bedrock of Traditional Arts and Culture and with Kalamu ya Salaam co-edited the book Go to Jail: Confronting a System of Oppression by the New Orleans Students at the Center. He is editor of the Insubordinate Spaces book series at Temple University Press and co-editor of the American Crossroads series at the University of California Press. The American Studies Association awarded Lipsitz the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in 2013 and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Career Distinction in 2016.
Event sponsors: Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Berkeley Public Health, City and Regional Planning, Othering & Belonging Institute
Event contact: bcsm@berkeley.edu; 510-642-0813
Access Coordinator: Maxwell Vanderwarker, maxwellvan@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0813
