Search results for ""Author Richard Rothstein""

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

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Widely heralded as a “masterful” (The 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). 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 areas. A ground-breaking, “virtually indispensable” (Chicago Daily Observer) study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history, The Color of Law is forcing Americans to face the obligation to remedy their unconstitutional past. • A The New York Times bestseller

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“The most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighbourhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson), The Color of Law has become a landmark work, selling nearly 1,000,000 copies. Aware that twenty-first-century segregation continues to promote inequality and exploit political polarisation, Richard Rothstein paired with housing policy expert Leah Rothstein to write Just Action, a book that energises local organisations to win community victories that might finally challenge residential segregation and cascade into a groundswell movement. The co-authors have produced a social blueprint for community leaders, concerned residents and everyday citizens alike, insisting that the private sector take responsibility for redressing the segregation that it played a large part in creating. Whether providing strategies for protecting renters’ rights and security, diminishing the dangerous black-white wealth gap, opening up exclusive white areas to diverse residents or stemming “white flight” from neighbourhoods in transition, Just Action, with trenchant insight, provides the groundwork for remedying America’s profoundly unconstitutional past.

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