The Color of Law: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

While President Franklin Roosevelt is often seen as a benevolent populist who prioritized the interests of normal working people in a time of need, he clearly did not do so for all working people. At the same time, it is clear that he was struggling against even more racist elements in the American government. But as Rothstein emphasizes at the end of his book, this does not mean Roosevelt’s racism and discriminatory policies can or should be forgiven. The “neighborhood composition rule” is an excellent example of how a program intended to discriminate and segregate can be disguised as objective and benevolent in order to win political support and/or avoid challenges in the courts. Still, the government’s racism lies in its assumptions: is there any good justification for segregating public housing or keeping neighborhoods homogeneous in the first place?

While public housing supported white communities, it impoverished African American ones, not because of an income or education difference between black and white residents—although there was such a gap, it did not cause segregation—but rather because it deliberately devoted resources to white communities, leaving African American people with inadequate housing and few government services relative to their population. This difference in services is one of the critical reasons that Rothstein considers segregation a way of keeping African American people as second-class citizens. The pattern of deliberate de-integration through public housing is different, and substantially worse, than simply exacerbating segregation according to the “neighborhood composition rule”—because it destroys integrated neighborhoods in the process too.

These cases are even more egregious examples of how government used its power to construct public housing and segregate neighborhoods at the same time. While conducted by the government, this was a relatively informal process, in the sense that it relied on individual government agents’ discretion and willingness to stretch the law. As Rothstein later emphasizes, while there is nothing illegal about destroying a park to build a housing project, consistently destroying public land to develop low-quality housing in black neighborhoods, while also making an effort to construct high-quality housing with minimal adverse impacts in white neighborhoods, constitutes an unconstitutional pattern of discrimination. A good comparison is employment discrimination: while it is very difficult to rule that any individual instance of a nonwhite person being rejected from a job counts as racial discrimination, a pattern of such instances does clearly constitute discrimination. However, in the cases of both housing and employment discrimination, this becomes difficult to stop because the courts need to recognize such a pattern and find a way to legally block individual instances of it from occurring in the future.

During and after World War II, government still took responsibility for housing precisely because it conceived of housing the (white) population as one of its responsibilities. However, Americans living in the 21st century likely realize that this is no longer the case—this function has since been delegated entirely to the private real estate industry, with government left to provide housing only for those too poor to find their own housing. This, too, is a de jure form of second-class citizenship—but, like segregation in the past, it is legal and widely considered right, in the United States, for the poor to receive inferior services because they are poor.

Notably, in this case, a court order did little to provide justice, because the local government simply refused to obey it. Like the example of the San Francisco Bay Area, the example of Boston (and especially Cambridge, which is home to famous institutions like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) also serves to remind Rothstein’s readers—many of whom may be upper- and middle-class white liberals living in these areas—that they, too, are partially responsible for segregation and obligated to reverse it.

In contrast to Boston, Detroit notoriously skews poor and industrial (although by no means less liberal), and many of Rothstein’s readers are likely familiar with its reputation for segregation, urban blight, and government neglect. This case shows how widespread and powerful racist and discriminatory attitudes were among white Americans—most importantly, those in government—during much of the 20th century. Discrimination was not always an individual decision by government actors, but also often an organizational mandate—in this case, at the federal (even presidential) level. Anyone who tried to fight the pattern of segregation, like the FWA director, would lose any power to fight it that they did have. So while segregation was technically against the law, every agent of the law was dedicated to enforcing it, and politicians were quick to harness white people’s racism for political gain. They had little interest in the (comparatively powerless) African American people who were harmed in the process.

This example again shows how local governments were less interested in performing their duty to provide required services to the population than in appeasing white people, even if this meant denying services to African American people. Notably, San Francisco’s discrimination was not based on taking any specific adverse action towards African American people—rather, it discriminated invisibly, by providing disproportionate benefits to white people. And the city’s refusal to follow its promise to stop discriminating again shows how executive agencies often remain free to ignore the laws if they so desire—which reinforces the need for strong judiciary systems and activist movements to hold government accountable. Finally, the construction of the all-black housing project in a neighborhood vacated by interned Japanese American people demonstrates how the government strategically makes concessions to minorities at the expense of other minority groups—which is a powerful way to maintain white supremacy without creating political tension.

Rothstein notes that officials were careful to stay inside the bounds of the law—not because this meant they were doing the right thing, but because this meant they could not be punished for doing something they “knew […] was wrong, if not unconstitutional.” Accordingly, the NAACP, courts, and city government’s efforts to stop segregation were meaningless because the actors actually in charge of housing policy refused to consider integration as a solution. Rather, the city needed dedicated integrationists inside the housing authority.

Rothstein again emphasizes that the government’s failure to integrate housing does not imply that nobody was fighting for integration; rather, people have always fought to protect minorities’ rights, just as others have fought to disenfranchise them—in 1949, the segregationists won yet again. Accordingly, the same high-rise projects that are today associated with black and Latinx poverty were actually built to help white people, even though they were not the group that most needed public housing. The fact that new construction inevitably burdened black communities (by destroying them) while benefiting white people (by giving them housing) demonstrates how those with the balance of power work in their own self-interest whenever possible. This happened not because local residents were necessarily virulent racists who wanted to deny black people housing altogether, but merely because they refused to let public housing be built in their neighborhoods.

Truman, who in Rothstein’s telling was the first president to pursue integration in any meaningful way, saw his efforts stymied by the pressure of subsequent governments and the Supreme Court’s apparent unwillingness to confront the harms of segregated housing. Rothstein points out that this happened at the same time as schools were being desegregated and the Civil Rights Movement was first emerging in the United States—and yet, in part because of opposition from the government, this movement completely failed to address residential segregation, one of the most consequential and enduring civil rights issues in the United States.

In yet another case, there is a complete disconnect between what experts decide should be done, on the one hand, and what the government actually chooses to do, on the other. This reflects the difficulty in turning integration into policyand points to the necessity of putting continued, consistent pressure on policymakers to take action—even though little has changed in public housing in more than three decades. Importantly, the obvious disparity in the quality of housing projects is clear evidence that segregation is not innocuous, despite what the white policymakers who implement it might say. Rather, it is a way to systematically deny rights and public services to African American people.

Yet again, local governments appear doggedly committed to segregation, to the point that they choose not to build housing at all rather than to build integrated housing. While this certainly results in part from inexcusable racism among officials and city planners, it also simply reflects the difficulty in convincing (even well-meaning) white people to accept integration in their neighborhoods. In short, white people’s personal interest in preserving segregation and maintaining the United States’s white supremacist racial hierarchy has essentially prevented the government from doing what it knows to be right (and has known for several decades). The problem continues to get worse, because local governments continue to choose inaction rather than pro-integration action. This points to the need for new kinds of policies and new forms of accountability for city governments in the 21st century.

Segregation is not only in the personal interests of middle-class white people (a group that usually includes the majority of the city planners and government officials who control public housing policy). It is also in the economic interests of the real estate industry, which cares only about its own profits, and not at all about justice. Even though government is supposed to balance the interests of private individuals against those of the general public—and especially disempowered people whose voices are underrepresented—in the case of housing policy, the government has done the opposite and acquiesced to the real estate industry’s demands to privatize all decent housing in the United States. As a result, the government has allowed a two-tier structure of rights and benefits to develop and consistently taken action to consign African American people to the lower tier. In closing this chapter, Rothstein emphasizes the degree of control that government does have over whether American cities are segregated or integrated, which serves as a reminder that positive change is possible and within reach—it just requires changing the way government acts.