The Color of Law

Widely heralded as a masterful (The Washington Post) and essential (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s ‘The Color of Law’ offers the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white areas.