White working- and middle-class people built equity, and the substantial appreciation of homes in the last 50 years means home are now unaffordable to many African Americans. As African Americans were blocked from homeownership, a significant racial wealth gap emerged in the 20th century. Residential segregation has significant impacts due to the multigenerational nature of economic mobility. Rather, he shows how all levels of government created the system of residential segregation. I can only implore anyone interested in understanding the depth of the problem to read this necessary book.Rothstein challenges the belief that segregation was de facto, or the result of individual choices. This compassionate and scholarly diagnosis of past policies and prescription for our current racial maladies shines a bright light on some shadowy spaces.-Publishers Weekly arrived at the 'systematic racial segregation we find in metropolitan areas today, ' focusing in particular on the role of government. Rothstein's comprehensive and engrossing book reveals just how the U.S. The Rothstein book gathers meticulous research showing how governments at all levels long employed racially discriminatory policies to deny blacks the opportunity to live in neighborhoods with jobs, good schools and upward mobility.-Jared Bernstein, Washington Post For the rest of us, still trying to work past 40 years of misinformation, there might not be a better place to start than Rothstein's book.-Rachel M. Only when Americans learn a common-and accurate-history of our nation's racial divisions, he contends, will we then be able to consider steps to fulfill our legal and moral obligations. Rothstein persuasively debunks many contemporary myths about racial discrimination. A groundbreaking, 'virtually indispensable' study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history ( Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.Įssential. Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. Widely heralded as a 'masterful' ( Washington Post) and 'essential' ( Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers 'the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation' (William Julius Wilson).

The book color of law