The Color of Law - 5 stars

[forsanolim]

I'm frankly shocked and appalled that I wasn't aware of the material covered in this book. In it, Rothstein lives up to the subtitle, "a forgotten history of how our government segregated America," in examining the government-policy-led and -influenced factors that underlay the "white flight" phenomenon. My high-school history classes touched briefly on "white flight," mentioning that white homeowners, who could afford to, moved en masse to the suburbs after World War II. However, as this book pretty pointedly demonstrates, there was much more to this than that one-sentence summary would suggest. From explicitly racist zoning laws to the denial of Fair Housing Act mortgage insurance to African American homebuyers to the court enforcement of "restrictive deed covenants" that prohibited homeowners from selling their homes to African Americans (and much more), policies at all levels of the government conspired to bring this situation about. I'd strongly recommend it as a look at a portion of American history that, at least in my own experience, is truly "forgotten" or never taught at all.

[Meli]

I look forward to reading this sometime, glad you got out of it what I hope to.

It's a chonker and after finishing Stamped From The Beginning, I will have to pass on this for now. Going to start on some witchy activity for August :)

[Nicole R]

I definitely want to read this as well. I want to get to Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot first though, but then I have this one up!

[forsanolim]

Meli wrote: "I look forward to reading this sometime, glad you got out of it what I hope to.

It's a chonker and after finishing Stamped From The Beginning, I will have to pass on this for now. Going to start ..."

Yeah, it was definitely worth reading, and I got a ton out of it. One thing I think the author does really well is making it very clear that this wasn't a problem at one time, or in one place--he had a really good grasp of what kinds of things were going on in an amazingly high number of cities/areas, so some things hit extremely close to home. I didn't expect to be so engrossed in a book about housing policy, but I definitely was.

Enjoy witchy August! And as far as the size of the book, I was actually surprised that it wasn't really as hard to get through as I'd expected. It's written pretty readably, and there's ~100 pages of notes/references/index, so the book itself ended up being pretty manageable for me.

[Meli]

forsanolim wrote: "Enjoy witchy August! And as far as the size of the book, I was actually surprised that it wasn't really as hard to get through as I'd expected. "

Thank you :)

And that's good to know about readability!