Throughout The Color of Law I asked myself if Black people were being deprived of resources, how is it that some Black people still managed to buy homes? Take into consideration that back in those times as a Black person you were pretty much guaranteed to be turned down for a mortgage and forget about a reasonable interest rate. These are the kinds of things that make me love learning about Black history, the overall story of perseverance and determination against all odds. Given the history shared in The Color of Law, it’s quite amazing that you ever had any Black homeowners back in the day.

The reality is that for Black people that have managed to succeed and do well in life, it’s in opposition to society being set up to guarantee your failure or at least make things difficult. But these different books provide data and facts that prove that narrative to be untrue. That they want to be on welfare and just have a good time. If you were to go by what is portrayed in the media you might be deluded into believing that poor Black people are poor because they don’t want to work. And not just in terms of segregating communities which led to the creation of what’s termed “Black ghettos” but also the homeownership and wealth gap between Black and White families. As I read, I was surprised at the many examples of the government playing a role in handicapping Black people with regards to housing and homeownership. but those seemed to all be tactics used by banks and private individuals.

I’d previously heard about red-lining, restrictive covenants, etc. The Color of Law goes back through the history of Black people in America beginning in the early 1900s and comes to the present, jumping back and forth at some points. For anyone that denies structural or institutional racism is a thing, it lays bare the reality that it is a fact. All three look at how policies, laws, initiatives, and various structural decisions played a part in the current economic state of Black people in America. Reading The Color of Law reminded me of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Reaching back to the first wave of the Great Migration in the 1920s, Rothstein thoroughly explains how in most cases, the government led the charge in creating segregated communities even in locations where none had previously existed and citizens had no desire for these restrictive zoning patterns. It disputes the widely promoted idea that individual racism and racist beliefs were the sole cause of housing segregation and the resulting discrimination that followed. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein charts the history of how local, state, and federal government policies and programs segregated cities across America.

The book color of law