
The Color of Law exposes how federal and local governments, segregated American neighborhoods. Author Richard Rothstein covers the practice of redlining, which helped keep “whites-only areas” whites-only. This forced black Americans in overcrowded and poor communities. There, they lacked the same opportunities for home ownership and building wealth. This a fact has had countless ripple effects on the economy and race relations in general. It’s a big part of why ending de jure segregation and then claiming that you’ve “fixed racism” doesn’t fly. The inequalities forged in previous eras linger. They affect things like disparities in wealth and home ownership. We’re still feeling the impacts of segregation in this among other ways.
Richard Rothstein wrote this book with a mission. He deeply opposed the Supreme Court ruling in Miliken v. Bradley in 1973, a ruling they affirmed in 2007. It suggested housing segregation was the result of individual racist actions. Specificallly, it was not a matter of city, state or federal government actions. Rothstein set out to prove this understanding wrong. He clearly intended for this book to directly affect future legal cases in America. Rothstein rejects the view that “an action is not unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so.” My own father was a lawyer. While I was a young adult, upset about injustice, he couldn’t help but enjoy annoying me a little about this stuff. He’d point out the Supreme Court has power to determine what’s constitutional or not. But as Rothstein suggests, if you assume this is true, you also have to assume that segregation WAS constitutional until 1954 when the Court decided otherwise. That seems like rubbish to me. It was always against the Constitution for every reason the court voted it down in 1954. The court was just too wrong-headed to recognize it. Their understanding of the Constitution was just incomplete.
And so we’re led to the question of segregation in housing. This is something that the high court claimed was due to private actions, not state actions. Rothstein says it was a provable combination of individual, corporate and government actions. This created a de facto caste system to keep black and white residents segregated in our cities.
Real estate agents would help this process along consciously by blockbusting. When this takes place, a small number of black Americans move into the neighborhood. Then, real estate agents whip up hysteria about an invasion of black homeowners. They put the fear of God into white residents that their property values are about to plummet. With that, they claimed,the neighborhood would go to hell soon after. White homeowners would sell their homes cheaply or even at a loss to real estate agents, then “get out of Dodge”. Real estate agents then profit by selling the homes to black homeowners at higher prices. Neighborhood after neighborhood went this route.
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, wouldn’t insure home loans to blacks in this era. They also wouldn’t insure them to whites if blacks were present in the neighborhood. Companies followed suit, and state governments refused to intervene. This created a compelling, government-directed bulwark against integrating neighborhoods. Few were willing to risk no longer being able to do business with the FHA or other banks themselves by bucking this standard of discrimination. New Deal programs that determined that determined neighborhood-level investment reinforced these policies. At one point the government claimed to enforce a “neighborhood composition rule”. This encouraged white neighborhoods to stay white, integrated neighborhoods to stay mixed, and so on. But this was poorly enforced. Governments worked to help segregate once-integrated neighborhoods anyway, especially in major industrial cities.
It wasn’t just the feds and banks doing this, either. Local zoning laws encouraged single-family homes and prohibited apartments in many areas. This was precisely because regulations shut black citizens out of FHA and other home loans for single-family units. Homeowners’ associations (HOAs) wrote bans on selling to black buyers into the terms of sale for homes in their neighborhoods. This was a process known as restrictive covenants. None of these were solely local decisions. The FHA explictly encouraged these practices in their published Underwriting Manual.
When people stood against discrimination, they met resistance at state and federal courts. When courts ruled for black petitioners and activists, governments often ignored the rulings. When black families moved to integrated neighborhoods, racists often chose violent responses. I’m talking about attacks and protests by neighbors and intimidation by police. I’m also talking about terrorist acts by the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Rothstein cites many instances where local police forces committed this discriminatory violence. Some even did so as simultaneous members of law enforcement and the local Ku Klux Klan cell. This isn’t in the distant past, either. Rothstein’s got the receipts on this up through 1985 at least. As the band Rage Against the Machine once told us (no matter how many of you don’t want to hear it),
“some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses.”
I’ve only given a taste of the persuasive evidence Rothstein brings to bear. He’s clear and direct, and this is not written in academic or legalistic language. Still, the sheer volume of data and relevant legal actions listed in this book is a bit overwhelming. That may make it a bummer to read, but it’s also what helps to make this book effective. This book is a hammer against a nail, and it strikes home over and over. It is a conclusive, throw-the-book-at-em strategy. It proves its case beyond all reasonable doubt. All levels of government practiced housing discrimination against black Americans. That legacy affects the quality of life and wealth of black communities today.
Read this book and understand why ending discrimination doesn’t make everything equal. The burdens and lost opportunities of the past carry into the future unless we act to prevent that. To quote one of the American South’s best writers who I still need to read, William Faulkner, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein has the receipts on how HOAs, city councils, banks, realtors, states and the federal government all actively and deliberately worked to keep our neighborhoods segregated. This ...
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