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So when you go to the OPRHC, you get listings in parts of the village where members of your race usually do not look for housing. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. Well, Richard Rothstein can. Of course, it’s not just the OPRHC. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. are 1 Short Summary and 4 Book Reviews. In 1973, the Supreme Court said no, and in doing so, dealt a crushing blow to the civil rights movement. Created by.
So Mr. Rothstein recommends adding this paragraph to the deeds of such property: We, [your name], owners of the property at [your address], acknowledge that this deed includes an unenforceable, unlawful, and morally repugnant clause excluding African Americans from this neighborhood. ), the resources below will generally offer The Color of Law chapter summaries, quotes, … And white people are all afraid of black people, and are unaware that eastern Oak Park exists. Other chapters cover tax policy; numerous additional local efforts to keep black people out, such as by hugely raising utility connection fees for “black developments” and paying black people to go away by offering them above-market prices for their homes.
First, there was, until relatively recently, vastly more de jure segregation than most people are aware. When we think of Late Antiquity, we usually think of Rome, either its decline in the West or its continuation in the East. But they don’t do any of those things, because the reality is they don’t want “those people” from Austin coming into their town. If there is a The Color of Law SparkNotes, Shmoop guide, or Cliff Notes, you can find a link to each study guide below. Rothstein’s book comes at a turning point for civil rights. New research published in 2015 and 2016 also revealed that the original, 1960s campaigns for civil rights and racial integration were far more successful than many had believed them to be. First, such practices are undeniably illegal under three different sets of law: federal, state, and local.
On another legal matter, Rothstein repeatedly complains that mortgage brokers and banks “targeted lower-middle-class African American communities for subprime lending during the pre-2008 housing bubble, leaving many more African American families subject to default and foreclosure than economically similar white families.” This may be true—but some, or perhaps all, of that targeting was required or encouraged by law, by the so-called Community Reinvestment Act, which Rothstein does mention, but only in an endnote, and by pressure by financial regulators to issue more loans to “underserved communities.” I’m quite familiar with both, and their effect was (and is) to require race-based lending to bad credit risks.
Required fields are marked *. The question of segregation’s origins, it was implied, extended far beyond the mundanities of government and into the collective psyche of Americans.
When the reader thinks “but what about . Why, I thought, would they do that? It attempts two huge tasks. Turned off by their overt racism, I ultimately found an apartment in Oak Park by myself, in those early Internet days, by going to the offices of the Chicago Reader the night before the paper was distributed, and being the first to call one of the few apartments offered for rent that week.
I am skeptical of those who predict the future by looking at the past. Rothstein notes that these facts were “knowable” all along; the Supreme Court even ignored evidence of government discrimination presented in Milliken’s lower court trial.
Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. Different eras view Alexander III of Macedon differently. In 2007, when rejecting school desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that discrimination “not traceable to [the government’s] own actions” requires no constitutional remedy. All contents © 2020 The Slate Group LLC. Looking at some of the most popular U.S. history textbooks in public schools, he highlights what little they have to say about segregation, especially in the North. He refuses to shy away from words like “ghettos” and “slums,” because, he says, no alternative comes close to showing how government action is implicated in their creation. Thus, Rothstein has been criticized in some quarters for overtly refusing to use the term “people of color,” instead explicitly insisting on “black” or “African American.” “When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another ‘people of color.’” He similarly refuses to use the vague term “diversity,” in effect recognizing it as a cult word designed to obfuscate through its meaninglessness—rather, he insists on using the precise goal term “racial integration.” This speaks well of his passion for exactitude, but undercuts the bogus narrative of generalized, non-specific but all-powerful “white privilege,” and thus makes him guilty of wrongthink. Many African Americans came to California to work, because the war opened up (some) opportunities for good jobs for black men—but it did not open up opportunities for good homes. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America from, Order our The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Study Guide, teaching or studying The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. ?,” the next paragraph or next chapter is nearly certain to address just that question. Most people believe these neighborhoods are “de facto segregated” (vii), that is to say the segregation is the result of private choices, not explicit action or inaction of government. All rights reserved. In Milliken v. Bradley, the court ruled that the white suburbs of Detroit could not be included in Detroit’s school desegregation plan, because no real evidence existed to show that segregation in the region’s schools or neighborhoods was “in any significant measure caused by governmental activity.” The justices concluded black students were concentrated in Detroit because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors.”. But since American schools don’t teach the true history of systemic racial segregation, Rothstein asks, “Is it any wonder [students] come to believe that African-Americans are only segregated because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves?” Only when Americans learn a common—and accurate—history of our nation’s racial divisions, he contends, will we then be able to consider steps to fulfill our legal and moral obligations.
These actions taken by government are not de facto, rather they are de jure—intentional, and carried out through law and public policy. : While Oak Park has a very wealthy section, it is a solidly middle-class inner-ring suburb of Chicago. The book describes the systematic violation of black Americans’ constitutional rights, through the aggressive enactment and enforcement of racially discriminatory policies. De facto segregation, it came to be called, a name suggesting a natural racial geography, which policymakers discover rather than create. The inevitable conclusion from Rothstein’s powerful demonstration of overwhelming government discrimination against black people is that the African American experience is unique. These included official refusal by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration to insure mortgages for black applicants seeking homes in white areas, or for white applicants seeking homes in black areas.