The Color of Law

Short Review: My main complaint early in the book was that it was a bit repetitive. But I realized toward the end of the book that I shouldn't be reading it as straight history but as an extended Supreme Court legal brief. Rothstein is making the argument that the 14th amendment on its own, apart from Fair Housing laws, should have made government encouragement of segregation illegal.

To get to that point he has to show that rules around segregation were not just incidental or the action of a few individuals that happened to have roles in government but part of a systemic pattern of encouraging segregation. And I think it is pretty hard by the end of the book to disagree with him, although I would have agreed prior to reading the book.

There were a number of areas I was already familiar with prior to reading the book. But in virtually every case, the level of intent was much higher than I had previously suspected. For instance I knew that minorities (in particular this book focuses primarily on African Americans, but it also applies to other minorities in most cases as well) were blocked out of FHA loans. But I did not realize that the FHA was the major provider of low cost loans to suburban housing producers as well as the primary provider of the consumer loans. The production loans required segregation to get the loans and initially required restrictive covenant on the properties to insure that the housing would remain segregated.

The book also deals not just with housing, but with areas that were impacted by segregation and made the segregation problems worse, like job markets (suburban factory jobs were either restricted or made more difficult because of segregated housing around those jobs sites), education segregation, inadequate or non-existent enforcement of banking and insurance regulations even recently, local police, zoning rules, and it goes on.

Rothstein is trying to persuade that not only were 20th century government actions illegal, but that as a society we owe a debt to minority citizens that were harmed by these actions. For instance one of the early, and famous, suburban developments was Levittown. Those homes were sold initially for about $75,000 in today's dollars. But today are worth about $350,000. This has created about $275,000 in wealth in three generations since they were initially built. But local African American segregated neighborhood that was mentioned in the book only had about a $15,000 increase in value in a similar time. This doesn't include the higher costs to own because of the higher cost loans to the African American families.

My full review (about 1500 words) is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/color-of-law/