This comic is based on the research in the book Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap, published by the University of California Press (2024).

 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, 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.