PDF Summary:The Color Of Law, by Richard Rothstein
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Widely acclaimed upon its publication in 2017, The Color of Law demonstrates that racial residential segregation—the fact that some neighborhoods are almost exclusively African American while others are almost exclusively white—is the result of explicit government policy rather than personal choice and random chance. From the conclusion of the Civil War through to the present day, federal, state, and local governments have enacted laws to confine African Americans to particular areas and prevent them from moving into others. These policies have had a profound and lasting impact on African Americans, affecting their educational and job opportunities, economic well-being, and physical health.
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Sometimes, agents wouldn’t even have to actually sell a home to an African American. For example, agents were known to pay African American women to walk through white neighborhoods with their babies in carriages, or African American men to drive through neighborhoods with the radio turned up, to frighten whites into selling cheap.
Contract Sales
When agents did sell to African Americans, they often employed a particular type of agreement called a “contract sale.” Under the terms of this agreement, the deed to the home would transfer to the buyer after fifteen or twenty years, but only if the buyer made every monthly payment over the term of the contract. If the buyer didn’t, they could be evicted immediately—because the payments didn’t earn the buyer equity in the home.
The repercussions of these burdensome payments—which were inflated by discriminatory real estate agents—were many and varied. It forced buyers to work multiple jobs or take in boarders to earn enough just to make their payments (many were evicted for nonpayment despite these efforts). The additional boarders created overcrowding in homes and local schools—so much so that many schools had to switch to morning shifts and evening shifts. The shifts gave rise to gangs, which gave rise to criminality, which caused whites to move out of integrated neighborhoods even quicker.
The Failures of the IRS and Other Government Agencies
Many other federal agencies besides the FHA contributed to racial residential segregation. The IRS, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve all, in one way or another, exacerbated it.
One of the central responsibilities of the IRS is determining the tax-exempt status of various US entities. Although its rules require the agency to withhold tax exemptions from organizations that countermand official public policy or promote prejudice and discrimination, the IRS regularly conferred tax-exempt status on entities that contributed to racial residential segregation. For example, tax-exempt religious entities like churches and synagogues regularly promoted segregationist policies like racial restrictive covenants.
Tax-exempt colleges, too, promoted segregation. The University of Chicago subsidized local property owners so that they could keep Hyde Park and its surrounds segregated. From 1933 to 1947, the University covered $100,000 in legal fees for the defense of restrictive covenants and the eviction of recently arrived African Americans.
The Role of Localities
As much as federal policy contributed to racial residential segregation, the small-scale efforts by state and municipal governments to keep their communities segregated, when considered in their totality, clearly point to a system of de jure segregation in the United States.
Slum Clearance
White community groups and public officials weren’t only concerned with excluding African Americans from residential areas—they also made concerted efforts to remove them from urban downtowns and business districts. (These were the areas into which Blacks had been pushed due to discrimination in the suburbs.) To reserve these economically important areas for whites, officials practiced “slum clearance”: the condemnation and demolition of dilapidated structures and the forced relocation of their current residents.
The most common impetus for slum clearance was infrastructure projects, in particular the federal interstate highway system. For example, in 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed a section of I-95 through a Black enclave adjacent to Miami’s downtown. By the time of the highway’s completion in the 1960s, the area’s African-Ameircan population of 40,000 had been reduced to 8,000.
School Placement
Prior to Brown v. Board of Ed., the famous 1954 Supreme Court case ending the doctrine of “separate but equal” in US public schools, many states used the location of segregated public schools to practice racial residential segregation.
One prominent example concerns Austin, TX. In its 1928 “Master Plan,” the city evaded a Supreme Court ruling that housing segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional by placing a variety of Black-only services, including public schools, on the city’s Eastside. The effect was significant: In 1930, the African American population of the integrated Wheatsville neighborhood was 16%; by 1950, after the segregated school for African Americans was shuttered, it was 1%.
State-Sanctioned Violence
In general, government can’t be held responsible for the intimidation tactics used by white supremacists to defend segregation. However, when public authorities either turn a blind eye—or, worse, encourage that intimidation—it amounts to an unconstitutional infringement of African Americans’ rights and de jure segregation.
Some of the earliest instances of state-sanctioned abuse of African Americans for the purposes of segregation occurred in Chicago. In the early 1900s, white gangs would throw rocks through the windows of African Americans to coerce them into moving. In the early 20s, whites firebombed African American homes on the border between white and Black areas. Despite two deaths from these firebombings, Chicago law enforcement neither made arrests nor pursued prosecutions.
This sort of vandalism persists into living memory. In 1985, an African American couple who’d moved into Sylvania, a suburb of Louisville, had their house firebombed twice.
Labor Market Discrimination and Residential Segregation
One explanation of racial residential segregation is that it isn’t the product of purposeful governmental policy but rather African Americans’ lower incomes—if African Americans had higher earnings, they could live wherever they want. However, this argument fails to account for the public policies whose express intent was to depress African American wages.
African Americans endured discrimination in the labor market as soon as they were able to participate in the labor market. Although famously promised “40 acres and a mule” by the Union at the conclusion of the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people ended up sharecroppers—essentially indentured servants on the land of their former owners.
Later, during the Depression, because FDR needed southern Democrats’ votes to pass the New Deal, he allowed exceptions into the laws that specifically excluded African Americans. In fact, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the agency responsible for implementing and enforcing the Deal’s new wage protections, excluded African Americans with brutal efficiency. For example, within the category of industrial work—which featured both white and Black workers—the NRA denied wage-and-hours standards to canning, citrus packing, and cotton ginning workers. These workers were predominantly African American.
Labor unions, too, discriminated against Black workers. Because African Americans were either shut out of or marginalized within unions during the war and after, they missed out on the high wages negotiated for union workers in industries like shipbuilding and housing construction. Although the NLRB ceased to certify white-only unions in 1964, no effort was made to compensate previously excluded Black workers, leaving them still well behind their white counterparts economically. Because African American wages have always been depressed, their ability to escape present-day ghettos is commensurately limited.
Enduring Challenges
Racial residential segregation is difficult to reverse for three reasons in particular:
1) Housing Unaffordability
The Federal Housing Act, passed in 1968, enshrines in law African Americans’ freedom to live wherever they can afford to. But historical discrimination in labor and housing markets has created intergenerational wealth and income disadvantages for African Americans that prevent them from living in middle- and upper-class—that is, predominantly white—areas.
Making matters worse, the value of homes in predominantly white neighborhoods has appreciated considerably in the last 50 or so years while the values in African American neighborhoods haven’t. This development has a dual effect: It makes homes in white neighborhoods even more unattainable for African Americans and it entrenches the intergenerational wealth gap between Blacks and whites (because the homes white parents pass on to their heirs have appreciated significantly while those that Black families pass on haven’t).
Homes in and around the famous Levittown subdivision provide a stark example of these effects. In 1948, a one-bedroom in whites-only Levittown went for about $75,000 in today’s dollars. Today, that home—even without major remodels or updates—sells for about $350,000. A one-bedroom in nearby Lakeview, NY, a predominantly African American town, also went for $75,000 in 1948. Today, the Lakeview home is only worth $90,000–$120,000.
2) Unintended Consequences of Race-Blind Policy
Although many policies passed in the 20th century had no explicitly discriminatory purpose, the fact that segregation was already entrenched meant that these race-neutral policies exacerbated housing inequality. The most salient example is the mortgage interest deduction, the tax break given to homeowners. Because homeownership for many African Americans was unattainable—due to the de jure policies of the FHA and other agencies, among other bodies—they were largely excluded from this government subsidy.
3) Flawed Social Programs
Federal and local governments have enacted programs to help low-income families secure affordable housing. Unfortunately, these programs tend to redouble segregation rather than remedy it.
For example, the Housing Choice Voucher program (also known as “Section 8”), which provides families with financial support to rent apartments they couldn’t otherwise afford, offers amounts too meager for families to escape low-income areas. Landlords in better-off areas also frequently refuse to accept housing vouchers as payment.
Potential Remedies
Given the challenges enumerated above, Rothstein is loath to offer remedies to racial residential segregation for fear they will inevitably come up short. Nevertheless, he proposes some initial steps that may, in time, lead to a more integrated, and thus more equitable, society.
Acknowledging De Jure Segregation
Americans must realize that racial residential segregation isn’t the result of personal choices or housing and labor market cycles. Rather, it is the legacy of explicitly discriminatory public policy that flouted the US Constitution and US laws. Acknowledging this fact opens the door for government to enact bold changes to rectify past injustices.
Financing Integration Directly
One of those bold reforms could be to subsidize African Americans to purchase homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. For example, the government could purchase homes at market rates in areas segregated by FHA policy and sell them to African Americans at historically pegged prices. Another strategy would be to subsidize low- and middle-class Black families directly to allow them to move to and integrate into predominantly white neighborhoods.
Banning Exclusionary Zoning and Implementing Inclusionary Zoning
Zoning ordinances prohibiting multi-family homes and requiring large lots are still on the books in many localities, effectively excluding lower- and lower-middle-income buyers—many of whom are African American—from living there. A blunt instrument is simply to ban these zoning laws (which were often racially motivated in the first place).
Another possibility is to withhold the mortgage interest deduction from homeowners in discriminatorily zoned areas or areas that aren’t taking steps to accommodate low- and middle-income families. The affected families would then put pressure on officials to promote integration.
In addition to mitigating the effects of exclusionary zoning laws, states and municipalities can enact inclusionary zoning laws. These laws actively promote the construction of affordable housing and the attraction of low- and middle-income families to mostly white areas.
Reforming Section 8
With the right reforms, the Housing Choice Voucher program could be a powerful tool for integration. One key reform would be to increase voucher amounts. Another would be to increase Section 8’s overall funding to ensure all people who qualify for a voucher get one. The program’s funding is currently limited and applicants are often denied vouchers due to the program’s running out of money. (In 2015, six million qualified people went without vouchers.)
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