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  • The Color of Law

  • A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
  • Written by: Richard Rothstein
  • Narrated by: Adam Grupper
  • Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (24 ratings)

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The Color of Law

Written by: Richard Rothstein
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
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Publisher's Summary

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

©2017 Richard Rothstein (P)2017 Recorded Books
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What the critics say

"With confidence and clarity, narrator Adam Grupper describes discriminatory laws governing the actions of the Federal Housing Administration, Department of Education, Department of Veterans Affairs, and other government agencies that have shaped African-Americans' ability to gain wealth, health, education, and voting power, not merely in the past but in the present day.... The Color of Law is compelling and convincing - and maybe even essential." (AudioFile)

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Wonderful read

This book does a fine job in explaining the unconstitutional segregation of black Americans. Very Interest read.

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Ground-breaking!

This well researched work eloquently demonstrates how the federal and state governments and their agencies actively confirmed and strengthened racial discrimination with respect to housing in the United States. The author shows how this was done de jure over the 20th century and even into the 21st with the subprime loans that led to the 2008 disaster. For instance, he discusses redlining whereby integrated neighbourhoods were excluded from mortgage insurance as well as the systematic denial of mortgage loans to African Americans over many decades. He explains that this prevented them from building equity and forced many among them to reside in ghettos. Many specific situations presented are in fact appalling for a contemporary reader, especially if he has never lived in the USA.

Sadly, the book is marred by some repetitions. Worse, though the issues are analyzed in depth, there is a paucity of proposed realistic remedies. For instance, the suggestion that, in the coming years, the government buy 15 % of Levittown’s homes as they enter the market and sell them to African Americans for $75 000 appears at once too complex to realize and little more than symbolic in addressing the issue’s vastness.

Yet, this work is a worthwhile eye-opener to the causes behind the current state of cities in America. All interested in urban development will find it pertinent and rewarding.

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