‘Just Action’ offers prescriptions to fight housing segregation

Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law By Richard Rothstein and Leah Rothstein Norton. 334 pp. $25

Three years ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, books on racial injustice became all the rage. One of them was “The Color of Law,” by housing expert Richard Rothstein, which had been published in 2017 to critical acclaim and brief bestseller status. In that sweeping history of racial segregation in the United States, Rothstein argued that most Americans continue to live separated by race not out of personal preference but as a result of decades of pernicious legal and government action and inaction.

In addition to documenting easy-to-condemn evils such as bank redlining and restrictive real estate covenants, Rothstein dared to discomfit White liberals by faulting such factors as the discriminatory terms on which suburbs were built and the “not in my backyard” zoning policies of liberal cities such as San Francisco. During that year of national selfreflection in 2020, “The Color of Law” struck a nerve: It leaped back onto the bestseller lists for several months and has sold nearly 1 million copies to date.

Now Rothstein and his daughter Leah Rothstein, an affordable-housing consultant, have produced a prescriptive sequel, “Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.” Since 2020, however, the national mood on matters of race has shifted. Talk of “racial reckoning” has given way to growing liberal fatigue and conservative attacks on any public acknowledgment of our tortured racial history.

To their credit, the Rothsteins have noted this change, and their guide is admirably light on self-righteous political bromides and heavy on practicality. They avoid loaded phrases such as “racist” and “White privilege” and decline to capitalize “black,” so as not to confuse anyone unfamiliar with that recent convention. On the Black studies debate, they go so far as to defend new state laws that allow teaching the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow but prohibit telling White students that they are personally culpable by dint of their skin color or their families’ economic advantages.

The authors also identify new nemeses that Black and White residents of these gentrifying neighborhoods can protest together. Since the financial crash of 2008, private-equity firms and other speculators have scooped up homes under default in urban Black communities and sold them at outrageous markups.