“Afternoon pastimes with a balloon — Eunice and Elinah are residents of an old age home run by an Afrikaner women’s charity in small town South Africa. In that country, senior housing sites like this one were first opened by and only for white settlers, and long-term racial discrimination, land dispossession and urbanization led to housing and social welfare crises for the majority Black population. After white-minority rule ended in 1994, old age homes, like other social welfare and health care spaces, were racially integrated. Generations of people who had fought for or against each other during apartheid, like Eunice and Elinah, now found themselves living together at the end of life. My research in South Africa as well as the United States shows how racism and ageism intersect to shape unequal access to housing — something all people deserve as a basic human right — and how older adults reconcile and remember in the aftermath of racial violence.”

—Casey Golomski, Associate Professor of Anthropology