The Color of Law

The Color of Law

by

Richard Rothstein

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Although “ghetto” is often used pejoratively to denigrate African Americans and other minority populations who live in neglected urban neighborhoods, Rothstein uses the word in its original, technical sense: “a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit.” Rather than using euphemistic language that wrongly suggests that African Americans have chosen to live in such neighborhoods, or that such neighborhoods are not as impoverished and underserved as they actually are, Rothstein insists on using the term “ghetto” to highlight the way that the government has intentionally “concentrated” African Americans into certain neighborhoods, then turned those neighborhoods into slums and created “barriers to [African Americans’] exit” from them, through the variety of policy tools he explains in Chapters Two through Nine. The ghettoization of American cities through de jure segregation policies shows how the government has created housing disparities to preserve the United States’ system of racial caste, which dates back to slavery.

Ghetto Quotes in The Color of Law

The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Ghetto or refer to Ghetto. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
).
Preface Quotes

Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.)

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: xvi
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor. The condition of public projects rapidly deteriorated, partly because housing authority maintenance workers and their families had to leave the buildings where they worked when their wages made them ineligible to live there, and partly because the loss of middle-class rents resulted in inadequate maintenance budgets. The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live. The loss of middle-class tenants also removed a constituency that had possessed the political strength to insist on adequate funds for their projects’ upkeep and amenities. As a result, the condition and then the reputation of public housing collapsed. By 1973 the changeover was mostly complete. President Richard Nixon announced that public housing should not be forced on white communities that didn’t want it, and he reported to Congress that many public housing projects were “monstrous, depressing places—rundown, overcrowded, crime-ridden.”

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. This, in turn, contributed to white flight when African Americans attempted to move to suburbs.

Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 56-7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

“In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.”

[…]

With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:
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Ghetto Term Timeline in The Color of Law

The timeline below shows where the term Ghetto appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain Theme Icon
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights Theme Icon
...emerged from numerous laws, across jurisdictions, that “combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs.” Courts recognized this through the 1970s, but then the Supreme Court... (full context)
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain Theme Icon
...uses “we” to refer to all Americans. Instead of the euphemistic “inner city,” he uses “ghetto,” a technical term for “a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but... (full context)
Chapter 2: Public Housing, Black Ghettos
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain Theme Icon
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights Theme Icon
The movement for building dispersed housing rather than “high-rise ghettos” began in the 1950s and won federal support in the 1970s, but very few cities... (full context)
Chapter 8: Local Tactics
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights Theme Icon
...decade, the damage was already done—most of the black residents had “move[d] into the Detroit ghetto.” Similar proposals in Miami, Camden, and Los Angeles were also approved not despite their racially... (full context)
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
...1954: local governments zoned school systems so that black students had to live in segregated ghetto neighborhoods to get an education. Unhappy that “all attempts at [segregation through zoning laws] have... (full context)
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
...to move there too. And Houston did this, too, convincing black residents to move into ghettos by overwhelmingly locating black schools, services, and even hospitals in those areas. (full context)
Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
In Part VIII, Rothstein explains how, since African American people were forced into ghettos, it has become harder and harder for them to leave, in part because housing is... (full context)
Chapter 11: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
...“Aggressive” policy solutions are the only way to undo this cycle of poverty in American ghettos. (full context)
Chapter 12: Considering Fixes
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights Theme Icon
...VII, Rothstein emphasizes that “black middle-class town[s]” need desegregation, too. Such neighborhoods are often near ghettos, and their youth must struggle to “resist the lure of gangs and of alienated behavior,”... (full context)
Epilogue
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Theme Icon
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights Theme Icon
...It continues contributing to segregation through housing assistance programs that force African American people into ghettos. While “undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult,” the first step... (full context)