# The Color of Law ***The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America*** is a 2017 book by [[Richard Rothstein]], published by Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, on May 2, 2017. Its central claim is that residential segregation in the United States is not mainly the product of private prejudice, income differences or personal choice. It was imposed by explicit, documented government policy at the federal, state and local levels. ## Why it matters The legal and political stakes of that claim are large. If segregation is "de facto," the result of private behavior, then courts have long held that government has no special duty to fix it. If it is "de jure," created by government action, then, Rothstein argues, the Constitution requires government to remedy it. The book shifted the public conversation about redlining from a story of bigoted bankers to a story of public policy, and it is the most widely cited popular account behind the history on pages like [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]]. ## What the book documents - **Racial zoning** ordinances that explicitly assigned neighborhoods by race, until courts struck them down. - **Public housing** under the New Deal, which systematically excluded Black families or confined them to separate projects. - **Federal mortgage insurance**, which steered loans to white suburbs and refused to insure homes in or near Black neighborhoods (see [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]]). - **Racially restrictive covenants** in property deeds, which courts and police enforced until [[Shelley v. Kraemer]] (1948). - **Government promotion of white homeownership**, including the federal "Own Your Own Home" campaign aimed at suburbanizing white families. - **Blockbusting and white flight**, which real estate agents drove and government tolerated (see [[White Flight and Suburbanization]]). Its final chapter, "Considering Fixes," argues that the [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] stopped future discrimination but did nothing to undo what government had already built, and proposes remedies. ## Reception The book was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction and won the 2018 Hillman Prize for book journalism. It became a bestseller again during the 2020 racial justice protests, spending a total of 32 weeks on the *New York Times* bestseller list by the end of that year. The geographer Richard Walker criticized it in *Jacobin* (2019) for overstating the federal role relative to local real estate interests; Rothstein replied in the same magazine. ## Connections - [[Richard Rothstein]] - [[Redlining and Housing Discrimination]] - [[White Flight and Suburbanization]] - [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] - [[Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing]]