ALEXANDER CHAVERS, GUEST BLOGGER
Rothstein’s “The Color of Law” is a book that forces us to take a long look at the history of housing segregation in America. From private realtors to neighborhood councils, to public works projects and even legislation, many factors have helped to continue the practice of dividing cities based on black and white.
But Rothstein’s central argument rests on one conclusion: that state-sanctioned policies and federal mandates created the apparatus under which segregation continues to thrive in the housing sector. He dismantles the idea of the New Deal being a liberal, all-inclusive program by pointing to projects such as the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Federal Works Agency (FWA), and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) as projects made deliberately exclusive to white homeowners.
At first, Rothstein notes, the language used to keep African-Americans out of housing in certain areas was written explicitly: no blacks allowed. But since the constitution prohibits this, government entities and private realtors had to find new ways to circumvent the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment.
One of these was denying loans for construction on integrated housing units, or denying loans for public works projects that were, in any way, targeted towards improving predominately black communities. Oftentimes, even if a housing agency wanted to desegregate, which was rare, they would risk all funding being cut off from the federal government. Many projects were thus abandoned, under pressure from public officials.
In the “Color of Law” Rothstein illustrates segregation as a systematic power, under which African-Americans are routinely placed into dilapidated slums and kept there, from generation to generation. Due to lower property values, lack of equity, and communal hostility, they are unable to move into higher-income, all-white neighborhoods. This perpetuates a cycle of immobility, both economic and social, that passes on to each succeeding generation.
By the time the federal government gets around to providing “public housing”, in the Johnson administration, these public units, now known as projects, are in such poor condition that they require more maintenance and upkeep than black, working-class residents are able to provide. The result: further depreciation of property values.
Black families have the added burden of having to commute longer distances to get to work and school, because they are not allowed to live in the same neighborhoods as their white co-workers. One of the reasons for this, the book says, is a constant mandate, both state and federal, for single-family housing units.
These units, tailored to the white middle class, are mostly unaffordable to African-Americans, the majority of whom have to rent through apartments. While the “single-family homes-only” mandate may not appear on the surface to be racially motivated, it does have, as Rothstein notes, a disparate and disparaging impact on potential black homeowners.
“Disparate” can describe the impact of many public policies listed in the book. It seems objective, under landlord-tenant law, to label certain zones as “risky” for mortgage lending, due to poor conditions and high eviction rates. But this “red-lining”, as Rothstein notes, is primarily an alibi for racialized zoning.
Most officials and private owners in charge of these projects harbored racial animosity. The word “unconstitutional” comes to mind initially. But if other factors could serve as a proxy for race, they would be used to justify racialized motives. Perhaps black people are bad risks simply because their property values are so low, or because they are more likely to be delinquent in rent payments. Perhaps black people just don’t want to live in white neighborhoods; forcing them would be wrong. All of these factors avoid facing the apparatus that first established them.
Oftentimes, many state actors and housing agencies are willing to admit the hostility that black residents are faced with when they attempt to move into “white living spaces”. However, this admission soon turns to complacency; integration is better avoided, as a means of keeping the peace. African-Americans attempting to move into white neighborhoods are now “instigators” responsible for white hostility in the form of riots, looting, and bombings.
Yet, city courts, police departments, and even federal agencies refused to hold them accountable. These local community “thugs” (a word often placed on black youth) and their irresponsible actions of looting, rioting, and even murdering black families, was protected as an action, not a crime of white passion. By fighting integration they are protecting the “natural” dynamic of racial apartheid: one that says the races are better off left to themselves. Thus, federal and state laws, both de jure and de facto, are made to quell rather than confront white bigotry.
As Rothstein shows, the worst part of prejudice is not simply its existence but the willingness by public officials and private actors to accommodate it at every level. The result of this complacency was a long-term infrastructure of public policies specifically targeted against African-Americans. History has given other names to these programs: the New Deal, the G.I. Bill. Yet all of these were organized to serve the interests of Jim Crow.
This deconstruction of American policy allows us to see a darker, often less talked about side of our history. The rise of interstate highways is not just a way to connect metropolitan areas: but also a way to separate them from poorer, black communities. Suburbia was not just a “shining example of American, post-war cosmopolitanism”, but also a form of affirmative action deliberately targeted towards white, middle-class families.
Rothstein’s “The Color of Law” is not just the story of an American dream deferred, but a dream divided. As a solution he does call on a system of reparatory spending, as has been suggested by a growing number of public officials. But first America has to reckon with its darker past.
Want to learn more? Watch the short film Segregated by Design:
Richard Rothstein narrates Segregated by Design, a short film examining how federal, state, and local governments segregated every major metropolitan area in America, based on his book, The Color of Law.
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