The Color of Law

The Color of Law

by

Richard Rothstein

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Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
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
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.
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Theme Icon

While readers familiar with 20th-century American history will immediately understand the importance of integrating American cities, others might wonder why segregation is necessarily a bad thing. As Rothstein notes, some might even ask why he wants “to force [Americans] to integrate.” In response to this question, Rothstein explains that the systematic segregation of American cities sustained the American system of racial caste—by forcing African Americans to live in ghettos, the government ensured that they would remain second-class citizens in their own country. Because of residential segregation, as compared to white people, African Americans have less access to quality services and resources; greater exposure to violence, prejudice, and toxic pollution; and fewer opportunities to enter the middle class or build intergenerational wealth.

Rothstein emphasizes throughout The Color of Law that residential segregation has wide-ranging negative effects on African Americans. Most visibly, segregation has deteriorated black neighborhoods: government consistently prioritizes suburban construction over improving urban areas, and often actively withdraws public services and funding from the under-resourced neighborhoods that need it the most. Such neighborhoods gradually fall into disrepair and, in extreme cases, turn into slums. Moreover, throughout the 20th century, African Americans paid more than white Americans for lower-quality housing, simply because they had far fewer options. For example, Rothstein notes that during the 1920s, Chicago landlords evicted white families and charged black families “50 to 225 percent” more for rent in the same apartments. Additionally, black families consistently pay far more in property tax, relative to the value of their homes, than white families. Together, these factors mean African Americans, on average, have less money for property maintenance and are more likely to be forced into overcrowded conditions in order to pay rent. This difference is just as pronounced in public housing: a group of investigative reporters found in 1984 that “every predominantly white-occupied project [in the United States] had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominantly black-occupied projects.” Moreover, well into the 21st century, the government still builds nearly all new public housing in segregated African American neighborhoods, which further impoverishes and segregates those areas.

Housing segregation also perpetuates deep income and wealth disparities between African Americans and white Americans. Because banks refused to give black Americans mortgages for most of the 20th century (a practice called redlining), they are “ten times more likely to live in poor neighborhoods” than white Americans today. Not only is “neighborhood poverty” more harmful to the next generation than simply “being poor,” but leaving a poor neighborhood is also “typical for whites but an aberration for African Americans.” As a result, the disadvantages of “neighborhood poverty,” including worse school systems and employment opportunities, disproportionately fall on African Americans’ shoulders. Segregation also affects black Americans’ ability to build wealth. Many white families rose into the middle class after World War II through government programs, like Veterans Administrations-backed mortgages, that were unavailable to African Americans. Now, home equity “is the main source of wealth for middle-class Americans.” But while white families have seen their homes’ value skyrocket, African Americans have a significant disadvantage because most could not buy suburban homes until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. To add insult to injury, most Americans’ wages stopped growing in 1973, while home prices have kept rising. Affording a home has become far more difficult since the 1970s, and this has hit African Americans hardest of all. Ultimately, these elements of de jure (legally-mandated) segregation help explain why the average African American family only makes 60 percent of what an average white family does in the United States, and only has 10 percent as much household wealth.

Segregation not only constitutes inequality; it also leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of expanding inequality. Forced to live in dangerous and polluted ghettos, African Americans have gotten “the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites.” This image “contributed to white flight” by leading white people to fear African Americans (rather than empathize with them) and government policies to punish African Americans for, rather than alleviate, their poverty. In this way, government used the poor conditions of American inner cities as an excuse to further worsen those conditions. And neighborhood segregation also engenders other forms of segregation. For instance, although the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in 1954, American schools remain just as segregated as they were then, precisely because neighborhood segregation (and thus racially-divided school zoning) continues to worsen.

Rothstein emphasizes that de jure residential segregation cannot be understood as an independent phenomenon; rather, it is an important piece in a complex puzzle of government-sponsored racial hierarchy in the United States. Specifically, segregation serves to maintain African Americans’ “second-class citizenship,” or subordinate place in a racial caste system. Since its earliest days, the United States has treated African Americans as an underclass. After two centuries of slavery and a brief period of Reconstruction, another century of severe segregation sustained many of slavery’s traits until the 1960s. When Rothstein wrote The Color of Law in 2017, the country had scarcely seen a half-century of formal legal equality between black and white citizens. Congress has recognized the continuity between the U.S.’s legacy of slavery, 19th- and 20th-century segregation, and the present day by clearly outlawing policies that “perpetuated second-class citizenship that was a relic of slavery.” However, in spite of this recognition, these policies continue to exist. Despite the advances achieved through the Civil Rights Movement, Rothstein argues that the battle for racial equality in the United States is far from over, and that residential segregation is one of the issue’s most important dimensions. Compared to other forms of inequality, “residential segregation is so hard to undo” because resolving it requires changing where and how people live their lives, rather than simply granting them rights they were previously denied. But Americans can only recognize the true importance of fighting residential segregation by seeing its place in the longer history of racial caste in the United States.

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Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste Quotes in The Color of Law

Below you will find the important quotes in The Color of Law related to the theme of Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste.
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

The director of the Federal Housing Administration supported Tenerowicz, stating that the presence of African Americans in the area would threaten property values of nearby residents. Foreman was forced to resign. The Federal Works Agency then proposed a different project for African Americans on a plot that the Detroit Housing Commission recommended, in an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites. It soon became apparent that this site, too, would provoke protests because it was not far enough away from a white neighborhood. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker), Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Page Number: 26-7
Explanation and Analysis:

In 1984, investigative reporters from the Dallas Morning News visited federally funded developments in forty-seven metropolitan areas. The reporters found that the nation’s nearly ten million public housing tenants were almost always segregated by race and that every predominantly white-occupied project had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominantly black-occupied projects.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:

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 4 Quotes

The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker), Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, banning court enforcement of restrictive covenants, had been unanimous, 6-0. Three of the nine justices excused themselves from participating because their objectivity might have been challenged—there were racial restrictions covering the homes in which they lived.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker), The Supreme Court
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.
Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

The consequences of racially targeted subprime lending continue to accumulate. As the housing bubble collapsed, African American homeownership rates fell much more than white rates. Families no longer qualify for conventional mortgages if they previously defaulted when they were unable to make exorbitant loan payments; for these families, the contract buying system of the 1960s is now making its return. Some of the same firms that exploited African Americans in the subprime crisis are now reselling foreclosed properties to low- and moderate-income households at high interest rates, with high down payments, with no equity accumulated until the contract period has ended, and with eviction possible after a single missed payment.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.

Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker), David Bohannon
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“N_____ have moved into Levittown!”

Related Characters: Bill Myers, Robert Mereday, Vince Mereday
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

It is certainly true that one cause of segregation today is the inability of many African Americans to afford to live in middle-class communities. But segregation itself has had a high cost for African Americans, exacerbating their inability to save to purchase suburban homes. Income differences are only a superficial way to understand why we remain segregated. Racial policy in which government was inextricably involved created income disparities that ensure residential segregation, continuing to this day.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

As it has turned out, schools are more segregated today than they were forty years ago, but this is mostly because the neighborhoods in which schools are located are so segregated. In 1970, the typical African American student attended a school in which 32 percent of the students were white. By 2010, this exposure had fallen to 29 percent. It is because of neighborhood segregation that African American students are more segregated in schools in states like New York and Illinois than they are anywhere else. Throughout the country, not just in the South, busing of school-children was almost the only tool available to create integrated schools—because few children lived near enough to opposite-race peers for any other approach to be feasible. Were housing segregation not pervasive, school desegregation would have been more successful.

Yet unlike the progress we anticipated from other civil rights laws, we shouldn’t have expected much to happen from a Fair Housing Act that allowed African Americans now to resettle in a white suburb. Moving from an urban apartment to a suburban home is incomparably more difficult than registering to vote, applying for a job, changing seats on a bus, sitting down in a restaurant, or even attending a neighborhood school.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Related Symbols: Homeownership
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:

Actions of government in housing cannot be neutral about segregation. They will either exacerbate or reverse it. Without taking care to do otherwise, exacerbation is more likely.

Related Characters: Richard Rothstein (speaker)
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis: