The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth Volume 73 - Paperback

by George Lipsitz (Author), Robin D. G. Kelley (Foreword by)

Compellingly argues that good health is as much social as it is biological, and that the racial health gap and the racial wealth gap are mutually constitutive.

The Danger Zone Is Everywhere shows that housing insecurity and the poor health associated with it are central components of an unjust, destructive, and deadly racial order. Housing discrimination is a civil and economic injustice, but it is also a menace to public health.

With this book, George Lipsitz reveals how the injuries of housing discrimination are augmented by racial bias in home appraisals and tax assessments, by the disparate racialized effects of policing, sentencing, and parole, and by the ways in which algorithms in insurance and other spheres associate race with risk. But The Danger Zone Is Everywhere also highlights new practices emerging in health care and the law, emphasizing how grassroots community mobilizations are creating an active and engaged public sphere constituency promoting new forms of legislation, litigation, and organization for social justice.

Back Jacket

George Lipsitz shines a brilliant light on the powerful connections between discriminatory housing conditions and wealth extraction and reveals the devastating health outcomes they leave in their wake. Backed up by extensive and accessibly presented research, The Danger Zone Is Everywhere paves the way for an integrative understanding of how the creation and maintenance of toxic and dangerous spaces (often referred to as 'social determinants') do enormous harm to bodies, minds, and spirits.--Tricia Rose, author of Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives--And How We Break Free

"Housing, health, and the arts are fundamental to precious life--not as separate categories but rather in their dynamic interrelatedness. Lipsitz exquisitely analyzes the spatial politics of both vulnerability and remedy. This beautiful book models abolition."--Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

"With amazing clarity and precision, Lipsitz explains how race-based residential segregation and wealth differences account for existing racial disparities in health and other areas of life. His command of the data and terrific examples will make The Danger Zone Is Everywhere the 'go-to' book to understand current racial affairs in the United States. In my estimation, this is his best book to date."--Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America

"In The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, Lipsitz boldly demonstrates that housing discrimination constitutes the backbone of America's devastating race and class inequalities. Through impeccable analyses and mounds of evidence, he documents convincingly how housing discrimination causes racialized residential segregation, which in turn causes disastrous health and wealth disparities for people of color. These avoidable disparities maim and kill millions of children and adults annually. Lipsitz, in chilling fashion, dissects how good people--bankers, university faculties and administrators, government leaders, insurance executives, physicians, lawyers, real estate tycoons, prison executives, public school leaders, corporate CEOs, and middle-class property holders--knowingly and unknowingly create and perpetuate housing discrimination that massively destroys the lives of marginalized populations. This book is a must-read because it shows how racialized residential segregation makes a mockery of the democratic values that America shouts from the rooftops. Lipsitz makes a bold, disciplined call for America to tear down and discontinue housing discrimination if it is to live up to its creed."--Aldon Morris, author of The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Author Biography

George Lipsitz is Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.