The Color of Law
2017 • 368 pages
Ratings42
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings42
Average rating4.3
One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2017 Longlisted for the National Book Award This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Reviews with the most likes.
This book is depressing and infuriating, but an important summary of the many ways that government actions at the federal, state, and local level supported or enforced housing segregation throughout the country. This book helped me understand my own neighborhood / city better, and the ways that systematically barring African Americans from the benefits of post-World War II housing and social programs has created injustices that perpetuate to this day.
Well researched, often repetitive, complete look at how the U.S. government has taken part in a system of racism and discrimination that continues to impact black communities today. I really enjoyed this one and think it is a must read. I want to read it again and look more deeply at its claims and potential solutions.
This book may have been very dry and repetitive in the manner of writing but it's also insightful in its subject matter, showing the myriad ways in which the federal, state and local governments used their laws explicitly and also provided cover for private enterprises, to discriminate against Black people when it came to housing, ensuring that they would never have the generational equity which had led to the rise of the white middle class, also leading to the current state of segregated housing across most urban centers in the country. The book covers most regions of the country, across the late 19th century and most of the 20th century, across party lines - and that's what makes this jaw dropping for someone pretty ignorant about this issue like me - how systemic and essentially legal all of this was and how the white supremacist governments used all their power to relegate an entire race of people to be second class citizens.
As the author mentions, it's not easy to reverse the damage caused by generations of this discrimination but it still falls on the current politicians and people to try, and the first step would ideally be to understand and accept this part of history.
