Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Color of Law, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights
Summary
Analysis
Rothstein notes that the series of civil rights laws passed by Congress in the 1950s and 1960s were “not without challenges,” but overall “effective,” in part because they involved only “modifying future behavior.” This contrasts with ending de jure housing segregation, which is comparatively more difficult because it “requires undoing past actions.” Through an executive order, President Kennedy ended federal support for discriminatory home financing, and the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968 “by the narrowest of margins,” meaning that for the first time, “government endorsed the rights of African American people to reside wherever they chose and could afford.” However, much has remained the same more than 50 years later.
Rothstein’s attitude towards the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s reveals both his optimism and his pessimism: he believes that popular mobilization can change laws and create a more just future for the United States, but also that these laws are generally inadequate and need to be designed in a particular, forward-thinking way in order to resolve residential segregation. This is why the Fair Housing Act, which ended discrimination, has done nothing to change segregation—the segregation of the present is the result of the discrimination of the past, and so stopping future discrimination will not stop segregation (only affirmative action to integrate cities will do so).
Themes
Rothstein declares that some forms of discrimination are “straightforward” to roll back: unequal voting rights, hiring discrimination, and segregation in transport can be solved through the passing and equal enforcement of new laws. School segregation is more complex, but it is still clear how to fix it: provide schools of comparable quality and ensure that schools are integrated. In contrast, desegregating housing requires “undoing the discrimination that previous generations received,” which is much harder. In fact, housing segregation is getting worse over time, and as a result “schools are more segregated today [in 2017] than they were forty years ago.” (Given this segregation, busing between neighborhoods is the only remaining way to ensure schools remain integrated.)
Rothstein is clear: justice requires the redistribution of resources, not just the provision of legal rights. There is no such thing as theoretical “equality of opportunity” when it comes to housing because everyone’s opportunities depend on things firmly lodged in the past, which are outside of individuals’ control—intergenerational wealth, access to education and job markets, and the color of one’s skin. So the only way to create an equitable housing system is to actually manipulate where and how people live—but in the opposite direction than the government did throughout the 20th century. This does not mean Rothstein advocates coercing or forcibly displacing anyone—only that the government can use incentives, punishments, and regulations to promote integration as much as possible.
Themes
Housing segregation is comparatively harder to fix simply because “moving from an urban apartment to a suburban home is incomparably more difficult than registering to vote, applying for a job,” and so on. Rothstein lists a number of specific reasons that “residential segregation is so hard to undo.” Children often replicate their parents’ class status, white people’s suburban homes have increased in value and turned into inheritance for their children, it is too late for middle-class African American people to afford “homes outside urban black neighborhoods,” tax benefits for homeowners disproportionately help white people despite being “seemingly race-neutral,” and government public housing and housing subsidy policies continue to “promote [segregation] implicitly.”
The difference between housing discrimination and other forms of discrimination reflects how essential housing is to every human being’s way and quality of life. In fact, its relevance is often overlooked precisely because it is so fundamental, and because it is considered part of the private rather than the public sphere. But segregation gets more acute over time: because wealth begets more wealth and income gaps widen over time under unfettered capitalism, simply leaving housing up to the market only leads wealth gaps to widen and single-family homes to grow more and more inaccessible for working families.
Themes
In Part I, Rothstein notes that African American people’s incomes grew more rapidly than white people’s during the 1960s, largely because they were finally able to find progressively better jobs. However, “working- and middle-class Americans of all races and ethnicities” have seen their wages stagnate or decline since 1973—the period during which “single-family home prices began to soar.” In short, “the window of opportunity for an integrated nation had mostly closed” by the time African American people could access the same housing and employment opportunities as white people.
The faster growth in African American incomes during the 1960s does not mean that African American people had opportunities not available to white people—rather, they were finally able to start catching up to white workers because their civil rights were more clearly protected. Although not by design, the fact that the sudden opening of the job market to African American people essentially coincided with the end of wage growth in the 1970s meant that the easiest way to achieve social mobility became through property ownership, rather than work. During and after World War II, a middle-class job essentially guaranteed a middle-class life for white people, but since the 1970s this has not been the case, and homeownership is a stretch for anyone without inherited wealth. As a result, the rate of homeownership has not grown, and those blocked out of it—a group that disproportionately includes African American people—generally remain so for most or all of their lives, which means they never get the chance to accumulate and pass down wealth or property.
Themes
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Rothstein illustrates this with an example: in 1948, Levittown homes cost the equivalent of $75,000 (in 2017 dollars), and Vince Mereday’s home in the African American neighborhood of Lakeview would have cost at least as much. Today, Levittown homes are worth more than $350,000, and Mereday’s Is worth around $100,000. In general, this pattern holds: white people earn much more from the appreciation in their homes’ value, and after the Fair Housing Act of 1968, “unaffordability” was more important than discrimination in preventing African American people from moving to the suburbs.
Although the difference in appreciation between Levittown and Lakeview homes cannot be traced to or blamed on any specific government policy, it is clearly a result of the overall bias of the housing market in favor of white people and neighborhoods. Therefore, homeownership itself also gradually increases the wealth gap, as whiteness quite literally pays dividends to white families lucky enough to own a home.
Themes
In Part II, Rothstein explains how the passage of civil rights legislation “did not translate easily into African Americans’ upward mobility,” because entering the middle class “has always been difficult for all Americans.” In fact, class mobility is harder in the United States than in most “other industrialized societies”—about half of the children of the poorest fifth of Americans remain in that category, and segregation makes mobility even harder for African American people.
There is a vast body of literature exploring why and how social mobility is so exceptionally difficult in the United States—a fact made even more paradoxical by the centrality of social mobility to the “American Dream” narrative that so many American workers define themselves and their aspirations through. Racial caste is a compounding factor because historical policies specifically targeting African American people have resulted in a society where black people have even less access to social mobility—indeed, race is a caste rather than a class in the United States because it is (virtually) impossible for individuals to change their race, whereas it is possible (though difficult) to move up or down in class. Therefore, racial caste and class inequality are mutually reinforcing.
Themes
In Part III of this chapter, Rothstein notes that, while the median black family’s income is 60 percent of the median white family’s, their household wealth is less than 10 percent of the median white family’s. This directly reflects residential segregation because “equity that families have in their homes is the main source of wealth for middle-class Americans.” The statistics for wealth mobility are similar—but slightly worse—to those for income mobility. And the disparity between general statistics and those for African American people is even higher. This has profound effects, as families can “borrow from their home equity, if necessary, to weather medical emergencies, send their children to college, retire,” and so on. Four times as many white people inherit wealth from their parents, and they inherit about three times as much as black people.
The enormous disparity between the racial income gap, which reflects earning power in any given year, and the racial wealth gap, which reflects cumulative earning power over decades and generations, shows the severe consequences of African American people’s historical disadvantage in the labor market: they have only recently won reasonable legal protections and continue to fight widespread discrimination, in addition to 21st-century economic conditions that make accumulating wealth much harder than it used to be (for all but the already wealthy). Homeownership remains the defining characteristic of middle-class status in the United States, and it is both a result of and contributor to wealth rather than income. Therefore, Rothstein indicates that it would not be a stretch to say that many African American people are blocked out of the middle class today precisely because they (and their parents and grandparents) were blocked out of homeownership for most of the 20th century.
Themes
In this chapter’s Part IV, Rothstein explains that neighborhood composition plays a large role in African American people’s lack of upward mobility. He cites sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s book Stuck in Place, in which Sharkey finds that African American youth are not only “ten times more likely to live in poor neighborhoods,” but also much more likely to “continue to live in such neighborhoods” in the next generation. Leaving a poor neighborhood “is typical for whites but an aberration for African Americans.” And being around “neighborhood poverty” is worse than actually “being poor,” for several reasons ranging from the lack of “adult role models” and job opportunities to environmental and nutritional factors, exposure to violence, and disadvantages in education and healthcare. “Aggressive” policy solutions are the only way to undo this cycle of poverty in American ghettos.
Rothstein continues to emphasize that inequality naturally grows over time in a capitalist market economy, unless the government redistributes resources more equitably. The market specifically uses racial and social difference to perpetuate this inequality: essentially, whereas most white people have built-in safety nets—through family, social networks, and government support—most African American people do not. A certain turn of events (like, say, a bankruptcy or medical emergency) could be inconsequential in a white person’s life, but spell disaster in an African American person’s, simply because segregation means that white people are more likely to be surrounded by people with the resources necessary to help. While even middle-class African American people often have to fight the effects of “neighborhood poverty,” even poor white people usually avoid them.
Themes
In Part V of this chapter, Rothstein emphasizes that the same policy can “affect different Americans differently,” and notes that such “disparate impacts” have continued adversely affecting African American people even long after the Fair Housing Act outlawed housing-related programs with disparate impacts. One example is the overinvestment in highways at the expense of public transit, on which African American people disproportionately rely. For instance, Baltimore refused to build “rail lines or even a highway to connect African American neighborhoods to better opportunities,” and instead spent the money on “building expressways to serve suburbanites.” This fight has gone on for more than 40 years and remains ongoing in the courts, as the NAACP has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city.
Although the Fair Housing Act has done nothing to mandate the active integration of American cities, Rothstein points out that it does include useful provisions for more effectively combatting the politically convenient segregationist policies that continue to proliferate in city planning. This changes the grounds on which court cases about discriminatory housing policies can be fought: before, it was necessary to prove discriminatory intent, but now it is sufficient to prove discriminatory impacts—which is far easier. However, as always, merely stopping discrimination in the courts, after the fact, is only a way of preventing the problem from getting worse than it already is—what is sorely missing is legislation that forces the government to undo the de jure segregation it has created.
Themes
In Part VI, Rothstein concludes that government “will either or exacerbate or reverse” segregation—it has to choose one. If it tries to do nothing, “exacerbation is more likely.” For instance, current antipoverty programs actually worsen segregation. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program benefits builders who construct housing for low-income families, but they nearly always do so in already-segregated neighborhoods. Similarly, Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers are insufficient to cover residents’ costs in anywhere but the poorest neighborhoods. A Dallas civil rights organization recently won a Supreme Court case establishing “the disproportionate placement of subsidized housing in [segregated] neighborhoods” as unconstitutional, but the results of this decision are not yet measurable as of 2017. Finally, the gentrification and redevelopment of city centers is now forcing African American residents to leave for poor, segregated neighborhoods like St. Louis’s Ferguson.
The battle is far from over: Rothstein emphasizes that, although the Fair Housing Act transformed the landscape of residential discrimination, it did not eliminate it, and residential segregation continues to get worse on its own. Rothstein leaves no uncertainty about the government’s obligation: inaction is not neutral, but rather a way of sanctioning segregation and allowing it to worsen. And because current programs are ineffective, they are forms of de jure discrimination that contribute to de jure segregation, too. Clearly, Rothstein’s book is intended as ammunition for political activists, attorneys, and policymakers who hope to reverse these policies and take active steps toward integration.
Themes
