In the preface of the book, Rothstein argues that, if it can be shown that housing segregation in America is the result of de jure factors rather than simply de facto, then all Americans have a constitutional obligation to remedy the problem. While de facto segregation simply exists due to people's habits, de jure segregation is the result of laws and ordinances that discriminate against minorities. Segregation is categorized into two types by Rothstein, de jure and de facto. He has previously written several other articles on race and educational accountability and is the author of several other books in the area, including Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Improvement to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Policy Institute, a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is considered a leading authority on housing policy in the United States. Background Īt the time of the book's release, Rothstein was a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. As of the December 20th, 2020 issue, the book has spent 32 total weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. It went on to become a bestseller during the mid-2020 resurgence of national interest in racial injustice following the George Floyd protests. The book has been reviewed many times and was received with critical acclaim among other honors, it made the longlist for the 2017 National Book Awards, was placed at number four on Publishers Weekly 's Top 10 Best Books of 2017, and won Rothstein the 2018 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism.
Rothstein wrote the book while serving as a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow.
Among other discussions, the book provides a history of subsidized housing and discusses the phenomenons of white flight, blockbusting, and racial covenants, and their role in housing segregation. The author argues that intractable segregation in America is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels, also known as de jure segregation - and not happenstance, or de facto segregation. The book documents the history of state sponsored segregation stretching back to the late 1800s and exposes racially discriminatory policies put forward by most presidential administrations in that time, including liberal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is a 2017 book by Richard Rothstein on the history of racial segregation in the United States.
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