Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Color of Law
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.epi.org/people/richard-rothstein/ * http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/an_interview_with_richard_rothstein_on_the_color_of_law.html * http://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-details-how-u-s-housing-policies-created-segregation
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nr 93002610
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nr93002610
HEADING: Rothstein, Richard
000 01239cz a2200241n 450
001 3564390
005 20171102151455.0
008 930125n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a nr 93002610
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca03305958
040 __ |a NjP |b eng |e rda |c NjP |d NjP |d NN |d DLC
100 1_ |a Rothstein, Richard
370 __ |e California
373 __ |a Economic Policy Institute |a NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall Institute |a University of California–Berkeley. Haas Institute
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Research associate |a Research fellow
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a His Keeping jobs in fashion, 1989: |b t.p. (Richard Rothstein)
670 __ |a Where’s the money gone? c1995: |b t.p. (Richard Rothstein) t.p. verso (California-based research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a columnist for several Calif. newspapers)
670 __ |a Color of law, 2017 |b t.p. (Richard Rothstein) dust jacket (Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Insitute and a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He lives in California, where he is a Fellow of the Haas Insitute at the University of California–Berkeley)
953 __ |a xx00
985 __ |c RLIN |e LSPC
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, senior fellow; Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC, research associate; Thurgood Marshall Institute of NAACP Legal Defense Fund, fellow; Haas Institute at University of California, Berkeley, fellow.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Richard Rothstein, who often writes on race and class issues, examines how the federal, state, and local governments enabled segregated housing patterns in the United States in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. While private companies were behind many racially exclusionary policies, various levels of government gave their blessing to these arrangements, Rothstein writes. For instance, in numerous cities, white homeowners had to agree not to sell their properties to African Americans. These so-called covenants were private contracts, but courts usually upheld them. The federal government made low-interest loans available for home buyers in whites-only communities, such as the popular postwar suburban development of Levittown, New York. The Federal Housing Administration, the source of many such loans, refused to insure mortgages in areas near black neighborhoods. In examples of direct government action, municipal zoning laws helped enforce segretation, and these zoning regulations often allowed factories or waste disposal businesses to locate in black neighborhoods but not white ones, damaging the environment in the black areas. Rent control laws, such as New York City’s, led white families to hold on to their apartments for generations. Even liberal icons such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt contributed to segregation, with his administration building separate public housing projects for blacks and whites–projects that were then designed to address a housing shortage among the middle class rather than subsidize homes for the poor. The federal Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, finally prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, but integrated neighborhoods are still rare in the United States, Rothstein notes, and blacks of all income levels are more likely than whites to live in impoverished neighborhoods. He proposes several ways to integrate housing, some of which he admits are unlikely to find support, such as having the federal government buy up houses in all-white areas and sell them at a discount to African Americans, or offering government subsidies for middle-class blacks to buy properties in affluent white suburbs. He also suggests changes in zoning laws to allow families with moderate incomes into affluent communities, as racial diversity will accompany class diversity, and he notes that some cities are already adjusting zoning in this manner.
Housing segregation has high societal costs, Rothstein told Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. “Today African American incomes on average are about sixty percent of average white incomes,” he said. “But African American wealth is about five percent of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a sixty percent income ratio and a five percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.” This phenomenon has contributed to other disparities, he continued. “The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children,” he told Gross. “They’re able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.”
On another National Public Radio program, All Things Considered, Rothstein told Ari Shapiro the motivations for racially exclusionary policies were complex. “One thing that should be remembered is that it can’t be blamed simply on the standards of the time because there were people who dissented,” he said. “People did know better, but they had other priorities. And they caved in to private prejudice and some of their constituents. They themselves were prejudiced. It was assumptions about racial superiority, but it also was cowardice in not confronting popular views about racial superiority.” Some politicians denigrate government programs to end segregation as unnecessary “social engineering,” but Rothstein said the policies that resulted in segregation were also social engineering. To reverse the pattern of segregation, “there will be prices to be paid, but those prices are small compared to the costs of the social engineering that was conducted in the first two-thirds of the 20th century by the federal government,” he told Shapiro. “And that’s a price that we have to pay to rectify a serious constitutional violation.”
Several reviewers thought Rothstein made important points. “He quite simply demolishes the notion that government played a minor role in creating the racial ghettos that plague our suburbs and inner cities,” related David Oshinsky in the New York Times Book Review. “Going back to the late 19th century, he uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration, including those we normally describe as liberal on domestic issues.” The result, Oshinsky said, is “a powerful and disturbing history of residential segregation in America.” In Washington Monthly, Richard D. Kahlenberg called The Color of Law “a searing indictment of racially segregating policies” and “a story particularly well told” that “should help educate a younger generation of Americans.” Booklist contributor James Pekoll termed it “a timely work that should find a place in the current national discussion.”
Some critics had a few quibbles. Rothstein “writes again and again about ‘black’ and ‘white,’ as if we had not seen a massive influx of Latino immigrants, who face their own discrimination in America,” Kahlenberg remarked. Rothstein maintains that Latinos have not been subject to the same systemic housing segregation as blacks, an assertion that Kahlenberg found dismissive. Oshinsky took issue with this aspect of the book as well, saying: “While the history of African Americans is undoubtedly unique, ranking groups by the discrimination they endured may not be the most productive way to proceed.” Kahlenberg also thought Rothstein should have paid more attention to segregation by economic class, although he noted that the author’s proposed solutions do address class. Both commentators praised the work overall. “Rothstein’s provocative book lays the moral groundwork for a strong government role in undoing the harm that government helped to create in the first place,” Kahlenberg concluded. Oshinsky added that “there is no better history” of housing segregation than The Color of Law. A Kirkus Reviews contributor likewise offered a positive summation, dubbing the book “an informed, important expose of the nation’s institutionalized racism.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2017, James Pekoll, review of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, p. 4.
City Limits, September-October, 2004, review of Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, p. 33.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of The Color of Law.
New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2017, David Oshinsky, “Don’t You Be My Neighbor,” p. 15.
Washington Monthly, June-August, 2017, Richard D. Kahlenberg, “Why Segregated Neighborhoods Persist: The Long Historical Reach of Racial Housing Policy,” p. 72.
ONLINE
Economic Policy Institute Website, http://www.epi.org/ (February 14, 2018), brief biography.
National Public Radio Website, https://www.npr.org/ (May 3, 2017), “A ‘Forgotten History’ of How the U.S. Government Segregated America” (excerpts from Fresh Air interview by Terry Gross); (May 17, 2017), “‘The Color of Law’ Details How U.S. Housing Policies Created Segregation” (transcript of All Things Considered interview by Ari Shapiro).
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Website. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/ (February 14, 2018), brief biography.
Richard Rothstein
Senior Fellow
Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy
University of California, Berkeley School of Law
2850 Telegraph Avenue, Suite 500
Berkeley, CA 94705-7220
Tel: 510-643-7191
Fax: 510-643-7095
Email Address: rrothstein@law.berkeley.edu
Richard Rothstein is Senior Fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law; and a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. He is the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press and EPI, 2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004). He is also the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003).
Richard Rothstein
Research Associate
Richard Rothstein
High-resolution
Areas of expertise
Education, Race and Ethnicity
Biography
Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other booksellers. The book recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. He is also the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008); Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004); and The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003). He welcomes comments at riroth@epi.org.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Today African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of average white incomes,” he said. “But African-American wealth is about 5 percent of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a 60 percent income ratio and a 5 percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.” The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children,” he told Gross. “They’re able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African-Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.”
RACE
A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America
35:43
Download
Transcript
May 3, 201712:47 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Terry Gross square 2017
TERRY GROSS
Fresh Air
Federal housing policies created after the Depression ensured that African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects, such as Detroit's Brewster-Douglass towers.
Paul Sancya/AP
In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America's housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a "state-sponsored system of segregation."
Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos
RACE
Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos
The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families," he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects.
Rothstein's new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods — a policy known as "redlining." At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.
Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says
CODE SWITCH
Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says
Rothstein says these decades-old housing policies have had a lasting effect on American society. "The segregation of our metropolitan areas today leads ... to stagnant inequality, because families are much less able to be upwardly mobile when they're living in segregated neighborhoods where opportunity is absent," he says. "If we want greater equality in this society, if we want a lowering of the hostility between police and young African-American men, we need to take steps to desegregate."
Interview Highlights
On how the Federal Housing Administration justified discrimination
The Color of Law
The Color of Law
A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Hardcover, 345 pages purchase
The Federal Housing Administration's justification was that if African-Americans bought homes in these suburbs, or even if they bought homes near these suburbs, the property values of the homes they were insuring, the white homes they were insuring, would decline. And therefore their loans would be at risk.
There was no basis for this claim on the part of the Federal Housing Administration. In fact, when African-Americans tried to buy homes in all-white neighborhoods or in mostly white neighborhoods, property values rose because African-Americans were more willing to pay more for properties than whites were, simply because their housing supply was so restricted and they had so many fewer choices. So the rationale that the Federal Housing Administration used was never based on any kind of study. It was never based on any reality.
On how federal agencies used redlining to segregate African-Americans
The term "redlining" ... comes from the development by the New Deal, by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color-coded by first the Home Owners Loan Corp. and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages.
On the FHA manual that explicitly laid out segregationist policies
Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America's History Of Discrimination
THE TWO-WAY
Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America's History Of Discrimination
It was in something called the Underwriting Manual of the Federal Housing Administration, which said that "incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities." Meaning that loans to African-Americans could not be insured.
In one development ... in Detroit ... the FHA would not go ahead, during World War II, with this development unless the developer built a 6-foot-high wall, cement wall, separating his development from a nearby African-American neighborhood to make sure that no African-Americans could even walk into that neighborhood.
The Underwriting Manual of the Federal Housing Administration recommended that highways be a good way to separate African-American from white neighborhoods. So this was not a matter of law, it was a matter of government regulation, but it also wasn't hidden, so it can't be claimed that this was some kind of "de facto" situation. Regulations that are written in law and published ... in the Underwriting Manual are as much a de jure unconstitutional expression of government policy as something written in law.
On the long-term effects of African-Americans being prohibited from buying homes in suburbs and building equity
Today African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of average white incomes. But African-American wealth is about 5 percent of white wealth. Most middle-class families in this country gain their wealth from the equity they have in their homes. So this enormous difference between a 60 percent income ratio and a 5 percent wealth ratio is almost entirely attributable to federal housing policy implemented through the 20th century.
African-American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and '50s and even into the '60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained. So ... the Daly City development south of San Francisco or Levittown or any of the others in between across the country, those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with an FHA or VA mortgage. African-Americans were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. Today those homes sell for $300,000 [or] $400,000 at the minimum, six, eight times national median income. ...
So in 1968 we passed the Fair Housing Act that said, in effect, "OK, African-Americans, you're now free to buy homes in Daly City or Levittown" ... but it's an empty promise because those homes are no longer affordable to the families that could've afforded them when whites were buying into those suburbs and gaining the equity and the wealth that followed from that.
How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'
NPR ED
How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'
The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children. They're able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African-Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.
On how housing projects went from being for white middle- and lower-middle-class families to being predominantly black and poor
Public housing began in this country for civilians during the New Deal and it was an attempt to address a housing shortage; it wasn't a welfare program for poor people. During the Depression, no housing construction was going on. Middle-class families, working-class families were losing their homes during the Depression when they became unemployed and so there were many unemployed middle-class, working-class white families and this was the constituency that the federal government was most interested in. And so the federal government began a program of building public housing for whites only in cities across the country. The liberal instinct of some Roosevelt administration officials led them to build some projects for African-Americans as well, but they were always separate projects; they were not integrated. ...
The white projects had large numbers of vacancies; black projects had long waiting lists. Eventually it became so conspicuous that the public housing authorities in the federal government opened up the white-designated projects to African-Americans, and they filled with African-Americans. At the same time, industry was leaving the cities, African-Americans were becoming poorer in those areas, the projects became projects for poor people, not for working-class people. They became subsidized, they hadn't been subsidized before. ... And so they became vertical slums that we came to associate with public housing. ...
The vacancies in the white projects were created primarily by the Federal Housing Administration program to suburbanize America, and the Federal Housing Administration subsidized mass production builders to create subdivisions that were "white-only" and they subsidized the families who were living in the white housing projects as well as whites who were living elsewhere in the central city to move out of the central cities and into these white-only suburbs. So it was the Federal Housing Administration that depopulated public housing of white families, while the public housing authorities were charged with the responsibility of housing African-Americans who were increasingly too poor to pay the full cost of their rent.
Radio producers Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner and Web producers Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper contributed to this story.
Quoted in Sidelights: “One thing that should be remembered is that it can’t be blamed simply on the standards of the time because there were people who dissented,” he said. “People did know better, but they had other priorities. And they caved in to private prejudice and some of their constituents. They themselves were prejudiced. It was assumptions about racial superiority, but it also was cowardice in not confronting popular views about racial superiority.” , “there will be prices to be paid, but those prices are small compared to the costs of the social engineering that was conducted in the first two-thirds of the 20th century by the federal government,” he told Shapiro. “And that’s a price that we have to pay to rectify a serious constitutional violation.”
'The Color Of Law' Details How U.S. Housing Policies Created Segregation
8:15
Download
Transcript
May 17, 20174:32 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with author Richard Rothstein about his new book, The Color of Law, which details how federal housing policies in the 1940s and '50s mandated segregation and undermined the ability of black families to own homes and build wealth.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
This is the day in 1954 that the Supreme Court issued its famous ruling desegregating schools, Brown versus Board of Education. Today, schools remain largely segregated, and the author Richard Rothstein argues that's because housing is segregated. Even today, black and white people generally don't live in the same neighborhoods. Rothstein's new book is called "The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America." Welcome to the program.
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Thank you very much.
SHAPIRO: So the basic argument of your book is that while racist individuals might have contributed to housing segregation in specific cases, there was an overwhelming amount of government policy at the state, local and federal level that explicitly forced black people to live in different places from white people. And I have to admit that reading this book, the geographic scope, the longevity, the sheer creativity of these policies really took me by surprise.
ROTHSTEIN: It takes many people by surprise. This whole history has been forgotten. It used to be well-known. There was nothing hidden about it. The federal government pursued two important policies in the mid-20th century that segregated metropolitan areas. One was the first civilian public housing program which frequently demolished integrated neighborhoods in order to create segregated public housing.
The second program that the federal government pursued was to subsidize the development of suburbs on a condition that they be only sold to white families and that the homes in those suburbs had deeds that prohibited resale to African-Americans. These two policies worked together to segregate metropolitan areas in ways that they otherwise would never have been segregated.
SHAPIRO: The book gives so many different examples of how this played out, and one of the worst offenders is the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration. Explain why this one government agency has so much influence over where people live and what the FHA did to prevent black people from buying and owning homes.
ROTHSTEIN: Perhaps the best-known example is Levittown, just east of New York City, but there were subdivisions like this all over the country. What the federal government did in the 1940s and '50s, it came to a developer like Levitt, the Levitt family that built Levittown. That family could never have assembled the capital necessary to build 17,000 homes on its own.
What the federal government did, the FHA, is guarantee bank loans for construction and development to Levittown on condition that no homes be sold to African-Americans and that every home have a clause in its deed prohibiting resale to African-Americans.
SHAPIRO: The FHA policies here were not merely incentives or encouragements. You tell the story of progressive, idealistic developers who wanted to build integrated housing communities and were absolutely unable to do so. And we're not just talking about in the Deep South here.
ROTHSTEIN: We're not talking about the Deep South at all. We're talking of the North, the West, the Midwest. The great American novelist Wallace Stegner got a job right after World War II at Stanford University. There was an enormous civilian housing shortage. He joined and helped to lead a co-operative of 400 families who bought a large tract outside Stanford University where they wanted to build single-family homes.
The FHA refused to insure those homes refused to provide the capital for construction because the 400-member co-operative had three African-American members. The co-operative tried to resist the FHA's demand, promising the FHA that the number of African-Americans in the co-operative wouldn't exceed the percentage of African-Americans in California as a whole.
The FHA refused that compromise. Finally, the co-operative had to disband because they couldn't go ahead with the project. They sold the land to a private developer, who with FHA guarantees built single family homes with racially exclusive deeds.
SHAPIRO: Your book also explains one way in which black neighborhoods became undesirable. You described zoning laws in which black parts of town were officially zoned for industrial plants, waste disposal, other things that we would consider a blight. And meanwhile, those businesses were explicitly kept out of white neighborhoods in the same cities.
ROTHSTEIN: Yes, there are examples in St. Louis and Los Angeles, neighborhoods that once they had African-American residents were rezoned to permit industrial and toxic uses. Those rezonings turned those neighborhoods into slums. White families outside those neighborhoods looked upon the neighborhoods, saw slums and concluded that African-Americans were slum dwellers and that if they moved into their neighborhoods, into the white neighborhoods, they would bring those conditions with them.
SHAPIRO: Why were all of these policies put in place? Was it just overt racism on the part of policy makers? What actually was the motivation?
ROTHSTEIN: Well, that's very hard to know. And one thing that should be remembered is that it can't be blamed simply on the standards of the time because there were people who dissented. People did know better, but they had other priorities. And they caved in to private prejudice and some of their constituents. They themselves were prejudiced. It was assumptions about racial superiority, but it also was cowardice in not confronting popular views about racial superiority.
SHAPIRO: So as you lay out this history, these segregationist, discriminatory, harmful structures were built over the first half of the 20th century, and then Congress passes the Fair Housing Act in 1968 which says many of those practices were illegal, unconstitutional and they stop - for the most part, the worst ones. Why doesn't that solve the problem?
ROTHSTEIN: Well, because all the Fair Housing Act could do was prohibit future discrimination. But by the time the Fair Housing Act was passed, the patterns of segregation had been firmly established. Simply passing a Fair Housing Act did not enable African-Americans who were previously living in urban areas to relocate to the suburbs from which they'd been excluded. I gave the example earlier of Levittown in 1947-48, when those homes were built with a racially restrictive policy.
Those homes sold for about $8,000 a piece or $100,000 more or less in today's currency. African-Americans, working class families could have bought those homes. Today though, those homes sell for $300,000, $400,000. They're no longer affordable to working class families. In the ensuing two generations, the white families who moved into those homes gained that $200,000, $300,000 in equity appreciation.
African-Americans living in rented apartments, prohibited from moving to the suburbs, gained none of that appreciation. The result is that today nationwide, African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of white incomes, but African-American wealth is about 5 to 7 percent of white wealth. That enormous difference is almost entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy practiced in the mid-20th century.
SHAPIRO: The current secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, has criticized what he calls social engineering programs that are meant to help black homeowners or renters. It sounds as though you're arguing that the first two-thirds of the 20th century were social engineering to harm black people in homeownership and that maybe it will require some social engineering to undo that harm.
ROTHSTEIN: Yes. What I tell Secretary Carson is that the reforms that he's criticizing are an attempt to undo social engineering. Clearly he's right that when you try to engineer social policy the way that is necessary to reverse segregation, there are some unintended consequences.
There will be prices to be paid, but those prices are small compared to the costs of the social engineering that was conducted in the first two-thirds of the 20th century by the federal government. And that's a price that we have to pay to rectify a serious constitutional violation.
SHAPIRO: Richard Rothstein is with the Economic Policy Institute and the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His new book is "The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America." Thank you so much.
ROTHSTEIN: Thank you.
Print Marked Items
Quoted in Sidelights: “an informed, important expose of the nation’s institutionalized racism.”
Rothstein, Richard: THE COLOR OF LAW
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rothstein, Richard THE COLOR OF LAW Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 5, 7 ISBN: 978-1-
63149-285-3
How government policies have perpetuated the caste system of slavery.Rothstein (Grading Education:
Getting Accountability Right, 2008, etc.), a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow
at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, mounts a hard-hitting argument
condemning federal, state, and local governments for devising laws that enforce segregation. Underserved,
blighted African-American communities, he argues persuasively, are not the result only of personal
prejudice or market forces but of unconstitutional "racially explicit government policies to segregate our
metropolitan areas." The author cites cases and decisions regarding public housing, racial zoning, mortgage
lending, the enforcement of housing covenants, fearmongering to incite white flight, planning for highways
and roads, IRS tax-exemption status for institutions that promote segregation, state-sanctioned violence, and
the effects of segregation on schools and income disparity. Although he sometimes refers to particular
individuals, his main focus is on law and public policy affecting neighborhoods. In 1949, for example, when
a proposed integration amendment to a public housing law threatened to be defeated by Southern
Democrats, liberals caved, voting for a program that stipulated segregation rather than giving up the
possibility of much-needed public housing. State supreme courts consistently upheld restrictive real estate
covenants that forbade sales of homes to African-Americans, claiming that such "private agreements" did
not violate the Constitution. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants did, indeed,
violate the 14th Amendment, the Federal Housing Administration continued to deny mortgage insurance to
homes in integrated neighborhoods. After World War II, the GI Bill denied African-Americans mortgage
subsidies and opportunities for education and training that were available to whites. Rothstein considers the
insidious effects of housing segregation on economic mobility, infrastructure, and politics. "Racial
polarization," he asserts, bolsters leaders who appeal to white voters' "sense of racial entitlement" and who
foster intolerance. An informed, important expose of the nation's institutionalized racism that would have
been even more reader-friendly with the inclusion of more individual case histories.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rothstein, Richard: THE COLOR OF LAW." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911665/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7906dd86.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Quoted in Sidelights: “a searing indictment of racially segregating policies” and “a story particularly well told” that “should help educate a younger generation of Americans.”
writes again and again about ‘black’ and ‘white,’ as if we had not seen a massive influx of Latino immigrants, who face their own discrimination in America,”
“Rothstein’s provocative book lays the moral groundwork for a strong government role in undoing the harm that government helped to create in the first place,”
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911665
Why segregated neighborhoods persist: the
long historical reach of racial housing policy
Richard D. Kahlenberg
Washington Monthly.
49.6-8 (June-August 2017): p72+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Full Text:
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Liveright Publishing, 368 pp.
The major unfinished business of the civil rights movement, writes Richard Rothstein in his powerful new
book, The Color of Law, is housing. Over the past fifty years, we've made considerable progress reducing
discrimination in restaurants, hotels, transportation, voting, and employment, he writes, but residential
segregation remains relatively high.
A half century after the Kerner Commission found that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one
black, one white--separate and unequal," African Americans are much more likely than whites of similar
incomes to live in poor neighborhoods. This is tragic, Rothstein notes, because where you live implicates so
much else in life--access to good schools, transportation, employment, and wealth.
Why have we made so much less progress on housing than on other frontiers of the civil rights movement?
Perhaps biased whites don't want to live in neighborhoods where black representation rises above a modest
threshold, while middle-class blacks have an understandable desire to be where they are not a small
minority and don't have to face discrimination from whites.
But these phenomena are rooted in something deeper, Rothstein suggests: a powerful legacy of deliberate
government action that has still not been remedied. Much of what we call de facto segregation, he argues, is
the result of "a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state and local governments that enacted
policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate." The inheritance today is continued racial
distrust.
Rothstein, a research associate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and former education columnist for
the New York Times, has produced a searing indictment of racially segregating policies, enacted, as he
notes, by otherwise liberal presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. While not
groundbreaking for experts familiar with this history, The Color of Law is a story particularly well told and
should help educate a younger generation of Americans. (Disclosure: I have known Rothstein casually for
almost two decades, and he contributed a chapter to a book I edited on educational inequality in 2000.)
Residential areas were comparatively integrated in the nineteenth century, Rothstein says, until a set of
deliberate acts to segregate began in earnest in the early twentieth. In 1910, Baltimore pioneered racial
zoning by prohibiting blacks from buying in majority-white areas, or whites in majority-black areas. Such
policies were struck down by a 1917 U.S. Supreme Court decision, so communities switched to economic
zoning, such as requiring that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single-family homes or have minimum
lot sizes. Because African Americans were (and are) disproportionately low income, economically
exclusionary zoning accomplished much of the same end result.
But segregationists also needed new ways to keep middle-class African Americans out of white
neighborhoods, so many homeowners adopted racially restrictive covenants, which required purchasers to
agree not to sell to blacks alongside other "undesirable" uses of the property. One such provision forbade
selling the home to someone who would construct "any slaughter house, smith shop, forge furnace," or "for
any structure other than a dwelling of people of the Caucasian race." These provisions were initially upheld
in the courts on the theory that the covenants were private contracts and not subject to the Constitution.
That was a lie, of course, because contracts don't have force without the power of the state, and in city after
city, courts and sheriffs evicted African Americans from homes they had rightly paid for to enforce racially
restrictive covenants. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, the federal government further deepened segregation as the
newly created Federal Housing Administration, which was designed to increase homeownership by
guaranteeing mortgages, instructed appraisers to focus on all-white communities. An FHA manual
suggested that the best financial bets were those in which there were safeguards, such as highways
separating communities to prevent "the infiltration of lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial
groups." In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white development located near an African
American community until the builder agreed to construct a concrete wall, a half-mile long and six feet
high, to separate the two neighborhoods.
In 1948, civil rights activists won a victory when the Supreme Court reversed its earlier ruling and
unanimously struck down racially restrictive covenants as a violation of the Constitution. Even then, white
mobs routinely harassed black families moving into white communities, subjecting them to violence as
police stood by. Not until 1968 did the Fair Housing Act outlaw racial discrimination in housing and make
violence to prevent integration a federal crime.
Rothstein toiled on this book for a decade, and the hard work shows. The research is exhaustive, the prose is
powerful and direct, and the blending of individual stories and larger trends is masterful. The greatest
strength of the book is that Rothstein has brought to twenty-first-century readers a powerful expose that
musters the moral outrage that accompanied the devastating indictment in the 1967 Kerner Commission
report.
And yet, the similarity to the Kerner report also constitutes the book's greatest weakness. The world has
changed profoundly in the last fifty years, and those changes are not fully reflected in Rothstein's work. He
writes again and again about "black" and "white," as if we had not seen a massive influx of Latino
immigrants, who face their own discrimination in America. Rothstein relegates discussion of Latinos to a
"frequently asked questions" section at the end of the book, where he dismissively suggests that "few have
been segregated."' (Rothstein rejects the term "people of color" for that reason.) But in 2010 researchers
found that the typical African American and the typical Hispanic both lived in neighborhoods that were 35
percent white.
Rothstein also mostly ignores critical trends in racial and income segregation by residence since 1970. The
black/white dissimilarity index (in which o is perfect integration, and 100 is absolute segregation) declined
from 79 in 1970 to 59 in 2010. But as Harvard's Robert Putnam has noted, "while race-based segregation
has been slowly declining," we have seen the rise of "a kind of incipient class apartheid" as income
segregation has risen significantly.
Part of the story, as William Julius Wilson of Harvard has documented, is that civil rights laws, including the
Fair Housing Act, reduced discrimination against middle-and upper-class African Americans who could
afford to move out of ghettos. Today, Wilson notes, income inequality within the African American
community is larger than within the white community. Left behind are a truly disadvantaged group of
African Americans who live in highly concentrated poverty.
Although racially restrictive covenants and racial zoning laws are, thankfully, illegal, class-based zoning is
widespread. As Rothstein notes, zoning laws such as those excluding apartments or houses on modest lot
sizes were upheld in a 1926 Supreme Court decision that, tellingly, likened an apartment house to "a
parasite," akin to "a nuisance." Just as racial segregation is not just the natural reflection of individual
choices, so too, our rising economic segregation is not just the result of market forces but is shaped by
government regulations that exclude.
Nevertheless, when it comes to remedies, Rothstein's first instinct is to propose race-based policies,
including those specifically aimed at helping more privileged African Americans. He suggests that the
federal government purchase the next 15 percent of houses in what have been all-white communities like
Levittown, New York, and sell them to African Americans at roughly 20 percent of the current market value
to approximate what their grandparents would have paid for the properties had they not been discriminated
against. He also suggests a federal financial subsidy to support middle-class African Americans moving into
racially exclusive suburbs.
To his credit, Rothstein acknowledges that these ideas are "politically and judicially inconceivable" and
quickly pivots to class-based remedies that are much more legally sustainable, and, as a matter of politics,
could theoretically unite the interests of working-class communities of color who supported Hillary Clinton
and working-class whites who favored Donald Trump.
Rothstein calls for an elimination of class-based zoning, or at least reducing the mortgage interest deduction
in jurisdictions that don't accommodate their fair share of low-income and moderate-income housing. These
are unlikely to be enacted at the federal level, but, as Rothstein notes, progressive jurisdictions from New
Jersey to Massachusetts are leaders in limiting exclusionary zoning. He also supports inclusionary zoning
laws, like those used in Montgomery County, Maryland, that set aside a proportion of new development
units for families of modest means. There are interesting alliances to be made between civil rights groups,
libertarians who oppose government regulations, and certain developers, who all chafe at exclusionary
zoning laws.
As we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act next year, addressing exclusionary
zoning could begin to remedy the growing spatial divide by class that disproportionately affects African
Americans and continues to prevent racial reconciliation. Rothstein's provocative book lays the moral
groundwork for a strong government role in undoing the harm that government helped to create in the first
place.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is the author of All Together Now:
Creating Middle-Class Schools Through Public School Choice, and is working on a book on economic
segregation in housing and education.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kahlenberg, Richard D. "Why segregated neighborhoods persist: the long historical reach of racial housing
policy." Washington Monthly, June-Aug. 2017, p. 72+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497799123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=075de3d7.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Quoted in Sidelights: “a timely work that should find a place in the current national discussion.”
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497799123
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of
How Our Government Segregated America
James Pekoll
Booklist.
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
By Richard Rothstein.
May 2017. 336p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $27.95 (9781631492853). 340.
Recent demonstrations in cities across America against the murder of African Americans by police returned
the question of segregation in housing to the fore. While the term de facto segregation is often used to assert
that this is the result of private decisions or personal acts of discrimination, Rothstein argues that the real
history of segregation is primarily that of explicit or de jure government policy, with personal actions
secondary. From wartime public housing to the FHA refusing to insure mortgages for African Americans
and many cases in between, government policy at all levels violated the Reconstruction-era constitutional
amendments mandating equal protections. Ghettos were deliberately created by official policy. Rothstein
provides plenty of evidence to support each example, including interviews, court cases, law codes, and
newspapers, along with secondary sources on each aspect of government discrimination. There is an
extensive FAQ section for further discussion. This is essential reading for anyone interested in social justice,
poverty, American history, and race relations, and its narrative nonfiction style will also draw general
readers. This is a timely work that should find a place in the current national discussion.--James Pekoll
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pekoll, James. "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America."
Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491487793/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=061cd9d7. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487793
Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic
and Educational Reform to Close the BlackWhite
Achievement Gap
City Limits.
29.8 (September-October 2004): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2004 City Limits Community Information Service, Inc.
http://www.citylimits.org
Full Text:
Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement
Gap
Richard Rothstein
Columbia University Teachers College and Economic Policy Institute, $17.95
Heroic teachers and model schools won't cure low achievement among poor students, argues Rothstein, a
former New York Times education writer. He marshals impressive data suggesting that the problem will be
solved only if the nation spends $156 billion more annually--on housing, health care, Head Start-style
programs and decently paid jobs for parents.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White
Achievement Gap." City Limits, Sept.-Oct. 2004, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A121210838/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4c3a7ee6.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A121210838
Quoted in Sidelights: “He quite simply demolishes the notion that government played a minor role in creating the racial ghettos that plague our suburbs and inner cities,” “Going back to the late 19th century, he uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration, including those we normally describe as liberal on domestic issues.” The result, Oshinsky said, is “a powerful and disturbing history of residential segregation in America.”
“While the history of African-Americans is undoubtedly unique, ranking groups by the discrimination they endured may not be the most productive way to proceed.”
“there is no better history”
Book Review | Nonfiction
A Powerful, Disturbing History of Residential Segregation in America
By DAVID OSHINSKYJUNE 20, 2017
Continue reading the main story Share This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Police and demonstrators in front of the home of a black family in Levittown, Pa., Aug. 20, 1957. Credit Sam Myers/Associated Press
THE COLOR OF LAW
A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
By Richard Rothstein
Illustrated. 345 pp. Liveright Publishing. $27.95.
In the summer of 1950, with Americans reeling from the news of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ever expanding “Red hunt” in Washington, Time magazine ran a disarmingly cheerful cover story about the nation’s housing boom, titled: “For Sale: A New Way of Life.” Featuring the builder William Levitt, who had recently transformed some Long Island potato fields into a sprawling complex of starter homes — two bedrooms, one bath and an extension attic for $7,990 — it spoke reverentially of the development’s parks and playgrounds and many rules. “Fences are not allowed,” Time noted. “The plot of grass around each house must be cut at least once a week,” and laundry couldn’t be hung outside “on weekends and holidays.”
One rule, however, was conveniently absent from the piece. Homeowners in Levittown were forbidden to rent or sell to persons “other than members of the Caucasian race.” Asked about this so-called “racial covenant,” Levitt blamed society at large. “As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice,” he said. “But I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. This is their attitude, not ours. As a company, our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.”
At first glance, Levittown stands as a prime example of de facto segregation, which results from private activity, as opposed to de jure segregation, which derives from government policy or law. Levitt, after all, appeared to be an independent businessman responding to the prejudices of the home buyers he hoped to attract. In truth, it wasn’t that simple. As Richard Rothstein contends in “The Color of Law,” a powerful and disturbing history of residential segregation in America, the government at all levels and in all branches abetted this injustice. “We have created a caste system in this country, with African-Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies,” he writes. “Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.”
Levittown reflected this dynamic. Popular with World War II veterans and their families, its 17,500 houses required no down payment. The federal government guaranteed low-interest bank loans for Levitt to build them, and low-interest mortgages for veterans to buy them. The government also made clear that developers receiving these incentives must sell to whites only.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
It didn’t stop there. In the 1950s, following a Supreme Court decision that restricted the scope of racial covenants, an African-American veteran bought a house in a second Levitt development outside Philadelphia. A white mob formed, the house was pelted with rocks and crosses were burned on the lawn. Amazingly, the black family held out for several years before moving back to a segregated neighborhood. Rothstein sees this incident, and dozens like it, as an insidious form of de jure segregation — the failure of racially biased police and public officials to protect African-Americans from unlawful intimidation.
Photo
One of the great strengths of Rothstein’s account is the sheer weight of evidence he marshals. A research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, he quite simply demolishes the notion that government played a minor role in creating the racial ghettos that plague our suburbs and inner cities. Going back to the late 19th century, he uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration, including those we normally describe as liberal on domestic issues.
Indeed, some of the worst offenses occurred with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. One of his New Deal centerpieces, the Public Works Administration, built 47 public housing projects, all rigidly segregated, 17 for blacks, the rest for whites. His vaunted Tennessee Valley Authority put white employees in a “model village” of 500 homes, while blacks endured “shoddy barracks” far from their jobs. When war came, the Roosevelt administration provided housing for white defense plant workers, but only temporary, poorly constructed dwellings for black workers. The few protesters included Eleanor Roosevelt, whose pleas for fairness fell on deaf ears. The president, no friend of civil rights, argued that ending the Great Depression and winning World War ll must take precedence over divisive social issues.
Among Rothstein’s more telling examples is Stuyvesant Town, a 9,000-apartment complex built on Manhattan’s East Side in the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The process of construction began with the city condemning 18 square blocks of a racially integrated neighborhood and transferring the land to the company, which received tax relief as well. Met Life executives made it clear that Stuyvesant Town was for “white people only” — a policy that led to protests and a compromise whereby the company agreed to lease a handful of apartments to “qualified Negro tenants,” while building a “smaller development” for black renters in Harlem. By this point, however, Stuyvesant Town was almost fully leased. Blacks were shut out, and would remain so, because New York City’s rent control laws kept turnover low for the original white tenants and their “lawful successors,” while rapidly rising rents for its vacated apartments made the development unaffordable for even middle-class families. Today, African-Americans constitute a minuscule part of Stuyvesant Town, which sits in one of Manhattan’s most famously “progressive” districts. (Donald Trump received a paltry 15 percent of the vote there in the recent presidential election.)
Newsletter Sign Up
Continue reading the main story
Book Review
Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Sign Up
You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
See Sample
Privacy Policy
Opt out or contact us anytime
What are the remedies? Here, Rothstein has less to add. A number of his pet ideas have no hope of gaining public acceptance, he readily admits, like withholding mortgage interest and property tax deductions from those living in neighborhoods that actively exclude blacks and the poor, or having the federal government buy a percentage of the houses that come up for sale in Levittown, which would then be resold to African-American buyers for $75,000 — far below their current market value but equal, in today’s dollars, to the original asking price of $7,990. Sadly, there is no easy fix. Though many states place restrictions of some sort on “exclusionary zoning,” a few have gone further to mandate “fair share” requirements for low- and moderate-income suburban housing, with incentives both for developers and local communities — a plan Rothstein favors.
As a call to arms, “The Color of Law” may be difficult for potential allies to embrace. Interracial alliances break down, Rothstein insists, “when whites develop overly intolerant judgments of the unfortunate — from a need to justify their own acceptance of segregation that so obviously conflicts with both their civic ideals and their religious ones.” Supposedly blinded by bigotry or ignorance, they refuse to acknowledge what Rothstein seems to see as self-evident: that the myriad social problems plaguing the inner cities today arise from race discrimination, and race discrimination alone. To dare to challenge this — to speak of individual agency, for example — is akin to flogging the victim. End of discussion.
Rothstein, moreover, rejects the phrase “people of color,” because it lumps African-Americans with groups that didn’t suffer as systematically at government hands — like Asians and Hispanics. (First- and second-generation Mexicans live in segregated neighborhoods by choice, we are assured, not because they are forced to.) While the history of African-Americans is undoubtedly unique, ranking groups by the discrimination they endured may not be the most productive way to proceed.
In his preface, Rothstein writes that America has a constitutional obligation to remedy de jure segregation in housing, and that its story must be told. While the road forward is far from clear, there is no better history of this troubled journey than “The Color of Law.”
David Oshinsky, a professor of history at New York University, directs the division of medical humanities at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is the author, most recently, of “Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital.”
A version of this review appears in print on June 25, 2017, on Page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Don’t You Be My Neighbor. Today's Paper|Subscribe