Podcast reading w/ free PDF 📚: The Color of Law~A Forgotten History of How the Government Segregated america By Richard Rothstein
The Color of Law~A Forgotten History of How Our Government:
Segregated America by Richard Rothstein Summary of book: In The Color of Law, historian Richard Rothstein notes that every single American city is segregated on racial lines and argues that this segregation is de jure rather than de facto: it is the deliberate product of “systemic and forceful” government action, and so the government has a “constitutional as well as a moral obligation” to remedy it.
Planned and implemented by all levels of American government, residential racial segregation impoverishes and disempowers African Americans by confining them to ghettos and blocking them out of homeownership. And this segregation continues well into the 21st century. Since residential segregation pertains to where and how people live their lives, the issue is harder to undo than injustices like the deprivation of voting rights, public services, and equal legal protection to African Americans. To make matters worse, governments, financial institutions, and the real estate industry continue to actively segregate American cities, to African Americans’ disadvantage.
"In Chapter One, Rothstein illustrates the problem of de jure segregation with the representative story of Frank Stevenson, an African American man living in Richmond, California in the mid-20th century. A former manufacturing town, Richmond grew rapidly during World War II. To keep up with demand, the government built public housing—for white people, it built a comfortable suburb called Rollingwood, but black working families were crowded into “poorly constructed” apartments in industrial neighborhoods, or even left to live on the street. Stevenson worked at a Ford Motor factory, which was soon relocated an hour away to Milpitas after the war. Stevenson was out of luck, because it was impossible for black people to live in Milpitas: Federal Housing Administration (FHA) funds were only allocated to all-white neighborhoods, so while housing options multiplied for white people in places like Milpitas, nobody built housing for African Americans. African Americans were thus confined to certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods consequently became entirely African American over time. The government subsequently withdrew services from those black neighborhoods, turning them into the “slum[s]” that they remain today."
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