Racial boundaries
Near the end of his authoritative new book about housing discrimination, Richard Rothstein pauses to consider how the subject is handled in high school classrooms. Alighting on a widely used American history textbook, he’s not impressed with what he sees.
“The 2012 edition has this to say about residential segregation in the North: ‘African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods.’ That’s it,” he writes. “One passive voice sentence. No suggestion of what might have done the forcing or how it was implemented.”
To Rothstein, who began studying housing issues in the 1960s, this is just another reminder that our understanding of residential segregation is based on half-truths, omissions and outright falsehoods. In “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” he corrects the record with such thoroughness that it’s hard to even imagine a worthy counterargument.
A senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute, Rothstein argues that a harmful “myth” distorts our perception of the segregated neighborhoods that took root from New York to the Bay Area in the 20th century: “We say they are ‘de facto segregated,’ that they resulted from private practices, not from law or government policy.” This is partially accurate — the shameful actions of many landlords, developers, homeowners and real estate agents prevented countless African Americans from moving to predominantly, or exclusively, white communities. But that’s only half the story.
The great, disturbing truth, Rothstein writes, is that government bodies across the country enabled and supported housing segregation for much longer than most of us realize.
Drawing on scores of court cases, hundreds of books and newspaper articles and his own interviews with the victims of institutional racism, Rothstein demonstrates that for most of the past century, “racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise wellmeaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.”
Throughout the country, many black families were thwarted at every turn. The obstacles included federally funded housing developments that systematically excluded African Americans; zoning codes written to keep blacks out of neighborhoods reserved for whites; blatantly biased lending practices on the part of government-insured banks; and instances of what Rothstein calls “state-sanctioned violence” — when authorities looked the other way as whites attacked black renters and homeowners in an effort to chase them away. The openly racist statutes and regulations have been removed from the books, but their effect is still felt, Rothstein says.
In Richmond, in the Bay Area, for example, the population quadrupled to 100,000 from 1940 to 1945, as the city’s shipyards drew wartime laborers of all races. The new workers needed homes, and lawmakers responded “with public housing (that) was officially and explicitly segregated,” Rothstein writes. Many of these homes were meant to be temporary, but after the war, as “the government financed whites” who bought “permanent homes in suburbs,” Washington “refused to insure bank loans made to African Americans for housing.” These and other policies “established segregated living patterns that persist to this day,” Rothstein says.
In New York, meanwhile, the state rewrote insurance laws in the 1930s to allow Metropolitan Life to develop housing complexes. In 1942, the company built Stuyvesant Town, a 9,000unit cluster of buildings near the East River. As part of the deal, the city gave Met Life a 25-year tax abatement — and allowed the company to develop it for “white people only.” “Negroes and whites don’t mix,” said Frederick Ecker, Met Life’s president. The long-term effects have been indisputable. As of 2010, Rothstein writes, “4 percent of Stuyvesant Town residents were African American, in a New York metropolitan area that was 15 percent African American.”
Richmond and Stuyvesant Town are just two examples in the broader pattern of statesponsored housing discrimination documented in “The Color of Law.” In the 1910s and ’20s, successive presidential administrations adopted policies and promoted legal workarounds intended “to prevent racial integration,” Rothstein writes, and “during the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants.” These maps informed the work of federally insured mortgage lenders.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Rothstein writes, lawmakers in Washington “spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities.” Though a 1962 executive order by President John F. Kennedy was meant to end Washington’s financial backing of segregated developments, Rothstein documents several instances in which government officials found ways to continue supporting housing discrimination.
One needn’t look very hard to see that these practices continue to shape life in any number of communities across the country. Residential segregation doesn’t end there — it affects everything from school funding to the accessibility of jobs and health care.
Rothstein closes his deservedly lauded book — it made the longlist of National Book Award contenders — with a list of proposals for mitigating the impact of entrenched residential segregation. These range from updating the way the subject is taught in schools to increasing the value of housing vouchers for low-income families.
But before any of that happens, he says, we’ll “have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.” This will be an arduous process, but books like “The Color of Law” will help light the way.