The Color of Law

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein

Black families in the US have, on average, about a tenth of the average White family’s accumulated wealth. Black men are far more likely than Whites to be stopped by the police, arrested by the police, or shot by the police. Black children lag behind White children in education almost everywhere. 

Racism, by my non-academic definition, is personal prejudice against people of color. It’s real, but today not nearly as pervasive as a faceless racism built into the way society functions. Those three discrepancies I cited in the first paragraph? One—policing disparities—may be largely due to personal prejudice. But wealth and schooling? There’s rarely a scowling face of prejudice behind those disparities. Rather, there are multiple societal forces at play, which make it so “it just works out that way.” You can’t find anybody to blame.

More accurately, you can find too many people to blame. Lots of different nicks and scratches add up, but it’s hard to say just when and by whom the car was trashed.

Richard Rothstein, a lawyer, makes the case that segregated housing is responsible for a lot of those nicks and scratches, not to mention the head-on collisions. Since Americans accumulate and pass on wealth mainly through the house they own, the difference between White suburban housing and Black inner-city housing is a major contributor to wealth disparities. That affects how people respond to emergency expenditures, and whether they can afford college for their children. 

But there’s more. Because Americans usually send their children to a neighborhood school, housing segregation leads to segregated schools, where “separate is not equal,” as the Supreme Court told us in 1954. Because Black housing tends to concentrate poverty, there’s more crime in Black neighborhoods, which circles back to downgrade the cash value of the housing and degrade the schools, which in turn leads to more crime. Segregated housing isn’t responsible for all our racial woes, but it contributes a lot.

People tend to segregate themselves, it’s true. The main reason Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America is that most people prefer to worship with people like themselves. Some White churches would deliberately make Black people unwelcome, I’m sure, but I’m also sure there are more White churches that would go over the top in trying to make Blacks welcome, in the process making them more uncomfortable. 

In bars, nightclubs, concerts, barbershops and beauty parlors, there’s a fair amount of self-segregation. New immigrants tend to settle near others who come from their home country, for very practical reasons (language and networking) as well as for comfort.

Housing is different, though. You choose where to live mainly on economic grounds: you want to live in a nice house. Having neighbors who look like you—or not having neighbors who don’t look like you—may be a preference, but for a lot of people it’s not an absolute. They’ll buy the nicest house they can afford, regardless of the neighbors. Segregation would tend to break down over time unless the government was working hard behind the scenes to make it stick.

That’s Rothstein’s case: that segregation isn’t just an unfortunate accident of personal preferences. No, the US government worked hard to segregate America, and keep it segregated. Rothstein asserts, therefore, that the US government is obliged to de-segregate America, undoing the damage done in the same way that it’s obliged to do away with nuclear waste in Hanover, Washington.

I liked Rothstein’s book because it’s very factual, proving its case with reams of historical information. I thought I knew a lot of the history of racism in America, but I knew nothing of this. For me, it really came home when he discussed segregation not in war-time Mobile, Alabama, or 1960s Chicago, but in parts of liberal Bay Area that I know well: Richmond, Milpitas, and Palo Alto. I had noticed, of course, that Black people tended to live apart from White people in those places. I had no idea what a concentrated, sustained barrage of work had gone on at all levels of government, federal down to local, to make it that way.

There’s no way a book review can comprehensively review Rothstein’s case, because it’s so information rich you almost have to read the book. In general, though, here’s how it worked:

After WWII there was a terrible shortage of housing, due to five years of the war and ten years of the Depression when almost none was built. Besides that, an exploding economy coming out of the war meant that people had money to buy, including Black people who had qualified for good jobs during the war and made the most of it. 

A lot of houses needed building, and the government subsidized them in lots of ways. Public housing was built, lots of it—always segregated. Sometimes it was built by tearing down poor neighborhoods that were mixed, thus turning desegregated housing into segregated housing.

Very importantly, the FHA and the VA guaranteed loans in subdivisions that were available only to Whites. The famous Levittstown was built by a private contractor, but only because the FHA gave a blanket guarantee of housing loans for white people only. That was duplicated all over America. 

Cities and counties used exclusionary zoning in suburban neighborhoods, excluding Blacks either by law or (more commonly) by income. By excluding apartments or homes built on small lots, they insured that only middle-income people could afford to buy. And guess what color middle-income people came in?

Furthermore, they allowed restrictive covenants to be written into deeds, and enforced them as though they were law. You couldn’t sell your house to a Black person.

The government further subsidized the (White) suburbs through roads and sewers and water projects, while inner-city (Black) development was deprived of rail and bus transport that would have taken residents to jobs that were moving out of the inner city.

Real estate agents were permitted discriminatory practices, even though they were licensed by the state. Banks were permitted redlining practices, though they were practically wards of the state. 

Discriminatory policies of real estate agents meant that Black people were kept from viewing White houses, though the real estate agents were licensed by the state.

Police connived with white mobs using dynamite and arson and armed threats to force Black buyers out of White neighborhoods.

Schools were deliberately situated in locations that reinforced or further encouraged segregation. 

Highways were routed through Black neighborhoods, demolishing them and forcing more Black residents into already crowded Black neighborhoods, which were the only places Blacks were allowed to settle. 

Section 8 and other low-income-housing policies steered poor people to poor (Black) neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act outlawed discrimination in housing in 1968, but most of these practices continued long after. 

I found it heartbreaking to read of the lasting, determined government policies that worked in the Bay Area to deprive Black people of decent (integrated) housing. Somehow it seems worse to learn of it in an area that you know, and where you never dreamed of it. Palo Alto?

Neara the end of WWII author Wallace Stegner and other Stanford professors started a co-op to build 400 houses on a 260-acre plot of land adjacent to the Stanford campus. Local teachers, city employees, carpenters and nurses joined in; three of the initial 150 families were African American. But banks would not finance construction nor issue mortgages without government approval, and the FHA would not insure loans to a co-op that included African-American members. The co-op board tried to find a compromise, promising that the proportion of Black homeowners would stay within the proportion of Black Americans in California. The government said no. Eventually the co-op gave up and in 1950 sold the land to a private developer, who built Whites-only homes with FHA-approved lands.

That’s just one small case out of hundreds that Rothstein details.