Higher Education as a Danger Zone

Abstract

On one of my favorite podcasts, Code Switch on NPR, co-host Gene Demby has a catchphrase: “Housing discrimination in everything.” This comes up in episodes dealing with wealth, with education, with policing, and so on. His intelligent and somewhat pithy saying serves to remind the audience of the interconnections of housing discrimination—and therefore racism—with any form of inequality in the United States. I thought of this phrase and this podcast while reading The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth, the brilliant new offering by George Lipsitz, my former colleague at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Given the plethora of ills we presently face, both nationally and globally, it is indeed the right time for such a book. In what follows, after highlighting the takeaways of this rich book, I extend Lipsitz’s lens of the danger zone to the plight of academia, specifically the position of Black women within it.