Talk to The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America like its author wrote you back.
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, in detail
Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law makes a precise and uncomfortable argument: residential segregation in American cities was not the result of private prejudice or individual choice but of explicit, deliberate government policy at the federal, state, and local levels. The distinction matters legally and politically. If segregation is the product of de facto choices — where people chose to live, what they could afford — then there is no clear government obligation to remedy it. If it is the product of de jure action — laws, regulations, and government programs that enforced racial separation — then the argument for remediation is constitutionally grounded.
Rothstein documents the mechanisms in systematic detail. The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, refused to insure mortgages in racially mixed neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining. Public housing projects were explicitly segregated by race, not by economic sorting. The GI Bill, which created the white middle-class suburbs of the postwar era, was administered in ways that excluded most Black veterans. Racially restrictive covenants — contractual prohibitions on selling homes to Black buyers — were enforced by courts until 1948 and effectively until much longer through private practice. Cities used zoning laws to confine Black residents to industrial areas and away from single-family residential zones.
The consequences are not historical abstractions. Wealth in America is primarily held in residential real estate. Families who bought homes in appreciating suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s accumulated wealth that was transmitted across generations. Families who were legally excluded from those purchases did not. Rothstein argues that the wealth gap between Black and white Americans today is substantially a direct legacy of these specific government policies, not an emergent property of cultural differences or market preferences.
The book is short, clearly written, and densely documented. Rothstein is careful to distinguish what the government did from what private actors did, and he acknowledges the limits of his own evidence. The argument is not that government policy was the only source of segregation, but that it was a large and underacknowledged cause — and one that creates specific obligations the country has mostly avoided discussing.
The big ideas
- 1.
American residential segregation is not primarily a product of private prejudice but of explicit government policy enforced through federal programs, court decisions, and local zoning.
- 2.
The Federal Housing Administration's redlining policy — refusing to insure mortgages in racially mixed neighborhoods — helped create the white suburban middle class while systematically excluding Black families.
- 3.
The GI Bill created unprecedented middle-class wealth for returning veterans but was administered in ways that largely excluded Black veterans from the suburban homeownership it financed for white veterans.
