The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

In addition to the other responses, defacto and dejure segregation and discrimination since the Civil War play no small part. A gross oversimplification is black people were effectively segregated into neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Segregated housing underlies many related issues (job opportunities, education, crime, health).

This is an excellent book on the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

Here's a book by an actual expert on the topic--

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

It has all the things your token black conservatives won't mention.

You're coming from a good place, but everyone who is advising you to take a deeper look at the ENTIRE situation is right. Just because YOUR family did it, does not imply it is possible for ALL in a similar situation. Please take a look at this book, if you have any intention of trying to understand it from a educational point of view - https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

Also want to recommend The Color of Law. Really great book detailing how all levels of government condoned segregationist housing practices throughout the twentieth century.

Thank you. Also, this https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853 is a great book to read if anyone is interested in understanding how things are the way they are today in America. Goes way more in depth than your school books.

So you also see the inherent systemic racism in capitalism, good start. Now, go actually do research on redlining and why it isn't just about value to be gained and more information being exploited. Start with https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853#ace-g5421475708

Color of Law is an essential read if you don't have it on your list already.

His most famous book is called "The Color of Law". Please buy it and read it. Its incredible.

One of his main arguments is that this goes far beyond the typical scope of "redlining". The government was extraordinarily creative in just how many laws were explicitly racist and created generations of inequality. It is unacceptable for a nation to escape responsibility and claim racism is a subtle "de facto" force when that same nation so deliberately and explicitly enforced it.

It's actually a generational story of iniquity.

Richard Rothstein - The Color of Law

This book goes into great detail about the history of government policy influencing the segregation of minorities through history and into the post-civil rights era.

I know you love to read

Highly recommend this book if you want to learn more about all this: https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

If you haven't read it, go read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. It's a fantastic book outlining how much of the modern 'De Facto' racism and segregation is actually the predictable result of government action (or explicit inaction), past and present.

I'm reading the book The Color of Law and it's about segregationist policies in the US against it's Black citizens.

This is right out of that book.

Playing:

I just gave up on hitting 100% completion on RDR2, for three reasons:

• I spent four hours trying to get a Perfect Robin Carcass, couldn't even find a fucking robin, fast-traveled to a new location, and lost the possum and oriole carcasses I had already collected due to some glitch
• I have to rob $50 from people, and for some reason, when you shove a loaded pistol in their face, EVERYONE in the game either decides to become a quickdraw artists or runs away in terror, so I end up killing six people and picking up a $40 bounty and only get sixty-three cents out of it.
• My fully-bonded Arabian was inexplicably replaced upon load with a generic Tennessee Walker, and this is apparently an unpatched bug that's been around since day one

I started playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but I'm almost positive that I'm not going to play more than an hour or two of it, because it's already insisting that I play the game a certain way, and I fucking hate games that insist that you play them a certain way. So I guess I'm going to start Shadow of the Tomb Raider once I get fed up with Sekiro.

Watching:

Nothing. I tried Lovecraft Country but it's too slow and cryptic and I just don't care enough about the characters to stick around to see what happens.

Reading:

Just finished Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, moving on now to The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The Color of Law is a pretty good book on it (very interesting read, maybe a little dry though). In addition to the not guaranteeing mortgages for black veterans, it talks about things like zoning, school districts, deeds/covenants, local law enforcement, etc.

For zoning, in places where housing was segregated, they'd put the new city dump, sewage plant, the polluting factory, etc. in the black neighborhoods, while white neighborhoods would be zoned for residential use only.

If the neighborhoods weren't segregated, but the schools were, then cities would relocate black schools far away from neighborhoods where they didn't want blacks, forcing black families to move away from those neighborhoods if they wanted access to schools.

New home developments would openly advertise they wouldn't sell to blacks in the early 20th century, then later in the 50's, 60's, 70's would simply advertise they're "exclusive" communities, but everybody knew what that meant. Home builders would put covenants into the deeds that the home could never be sold/rented/leased to a black person (wasn't outlawed until 1968).

Despite all that, when a black family was able to move into a white neighborhood, there might be a white mob in front of the house, and of course the police would do nothing (we serve the community and this is what the community wants).

One of the big fears was that blacks would come in and lower the property values, but because blacks were so desperate for good housing, they were willingly paying well above market prices for homes.

And this stuff wasn't just happening in the racist, southern states, but places like New York, New Jersey, California, etc.

Really interesting book, I'd recommend reading it for anyone interested in this kind of thing.

I just skimmed this article, but it seems to be the short version of what you are looking for.

If you are truly interested in the subject and want to dig deeper, I recommend Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law, which is probably the most thorough but accessible history of exclusionary zoning.

It's fascinating and seldom discussed that segregation was de jure and enforced by government into the 1970s. The government's role in building the suburbs, combined with the de jure segregation, was one of the ways wealth was transferred to the growing white middle class, while blacks were explicitly excluded. Even the way our schools are funded by local property taxes is a vestige of this segregation.

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(law)#Exclusionary_covenants

HOAs are a harsher versions of municipal zoning codes.

Zoning codes were put in place starting in the 1910s. They have steadily expanded since then. The intent, then as now, was not so much to define what was the in the neighborhood but what was kept out of the neighborhood.

Initially the focus was to keep out Blacks. This was done by setting minimal lot sizes such that only big, expensive houses would be built in the neighborhood and which Blacks could not afford. In addition, stores were forbidden within walking distance and the streets were laid in such a way that a car required to shop or go to work. This made the neighborhood even more financially in-accessible to Blacks.

Much has been written about this. Richard Rothstein wrote in the Color of Law how zoning codes were used along with redlining to keep poor Blacks from neighborhoods.

Zoning codes are extremely popular still today. The are not as focused as keeping out Blacks as they are in keeping out poor people in general. The methods are the same however, such as banning multi-unit apartment buildings that poorer persons might afford or limiting mass transit options which poor people tend to use more than wealthy people.

Not at all. I love talking about this stuff and I think it's important.

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein - This is a book that examines segregationist policies in place all the way up until the 1980s that prevented blacks from buying homes in white neighborhoods. These policies weren't Southern Jim Crow stuff either, but systemic ones in all manner of Northern cities and states. It sheds a lot of light on just how far white people went to stop blacks from migrating into their communities, and just much economic progress for that community was lost because they did.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander - This book is a broad critique of the criminal justice system. It details how many of our criminal statues were explicitly written to target black communities, the biases in sentencing for similar crimes between whites and blacks, how laws targeting convicted criminals who've served their time make it economically impossible for them to get good jobs to rehabilitate themselves and how all of this creates a new system of sanitized segregation. Blacks are still being targeted, but we can gloss over it with the veneer that they're criminals, nevermind that we specifically engineered our laws to make them such.

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment This one has a ton of authors because it's more of a compilation of studies by prominent criminal justice scholars. The main thrust, though, is that racial profiling in policing is a war that feeds itself. Blacks are arrested for more crimes, because police have targeted their communities looking for them, and using the fact that they're finding them as further justification to target the communities. A lot of this results in day to day harassment, a lot of it in crimes being ignored in other communities. All of it is fueled by a police methodology that rewards departments for prosecuting crimes major and minor, giving them an incentive to heavily target communities that will generate arrests.

Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal by Alexander Natapoff This book is about the excessive use of misdemeanors to generate said arrest statistics and to nickel and dime communities for all they're worth. It details how cities and counties have begun using police as an arm of revenue generating, and the impact that's had on poor and black communities. This is where you find cases that like the Ferguson study did of a single parking violation leading to jail time and finds in excess of $1,000. And this, I think, is where the real resentment of police really stems from. If your only interactions with cops consist of harassment over ticky tacky statutes created to generate fine revenue, you're not going to think very highly of them and might lead you to setting some shit on fire when they start murdering people in those arrests.

There are a few more I could name, but these are really critical, in my opinion, to understanding what's going on in the MN protests.

> Yah, fuck reparations.

MLK advocated for reparations:

https://youtu.be/2xsbt3a7K-8?t=860

-

>Are we going to go through the entirety of human history, and figure out which groups got the worst deals, and pay them back?

What kind of dumbass fucking question is that? You can oppose reparations for American descendants of slaves but why does this topic cause some to go beyond that and into asking extremely stupid, nonsense questions? Just ridiculously idiotic on multiple obvious levels.

Here's one: Ever consider the fact that you know or can find out who your ancestors actually are? Ever consider that huge difference in history and existential reality between you and those whose past you're ignorantly devaluing?

To answer your telling, myopic, intelligence-insulting question, why would the U.S. be responsible for restitution?

You sound like veganmark and others when they also turn their brains off for some reason and bring up similar irrelevant parallels: Brilliant fucking contorted gems like "Does Bernie get reparations for the fact that his father came to the US without a cent to his name because his relatives were destined to be slaughtered by the Nazis?" Just blatant demonstrations of willing, abject ignorance and deliberate blindness with respect to the documented facts and nuance associated with this issue.

Your dime-a-dozen mindset is too hopelessly self-centered and regressive to spend any more time on so I'm just gonna repost part of a previous response to this same kind of bullshit:

-

To this day, Jewish families in Germany that survived the Holocaust are receiving reparations. And it looks like others may not be done collecting yet:

Poles look to charge Germans $850 billion to mark 80 years since Nazi invasion

>A Polish lawmaker said Friday that a committee examining potential German reparations to Poland hoped to complete its report by September 1, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion, and would likely demand up to $850 billion for the damage inflicted during World War II.

It's interesting to see which groups can push for (and have been successful at obtaining) reparations without catching predictable, often nonsensical flak/closed-minded idiocy that obscures discussion on the merits and who cannot.

Some are even offered an extra boost! Like Joe Biden proposing $30 million for Holocaust survivors in 2013. Forget the American citizens whose lives were continually destroyed for centuries and their descendants' futures harmed with the help of the U.S. government, let's try to take on the moral obligations of other countries first!

Slavery, Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration, The War on Drugs, Redlining, race rioting targeting black businesses, VA home loans that shut out Black WW2 vets, etc. are extremely consequential uncompensated crimes. As late as the 1960s, blacks were still separated in public and prisons from most all other races. Just blacks. Not latino, not Jewish, not Irish. Just black! Not even a lifetime ago. If your sense of justice leads you to believe no form of compensation should ever be provided, or even explored, and that a large percentage of black Americans should just shut their faces after absorbing the enormity of the generational injury visited upon them (starkly illustrated by the racial wealth gap, imprisonment statistics, etc.), that's completely on you.

Just don't be surprised when others make inroads with affected populations who know full well just how thoroughly they've been fucked with for hundreds of years (regardless of how effectively this dark history has been suppressed).

>"Tepid solutions are not enough for the times in which we live; we need huge, strategized acts of righteousness, now. Just as Germany has paid $89 Billion in reparations to Jewish organizations since WW2, the United States should pay reparations for slavery." -@marwilliamson

-

Cornel West gets it, why don't you:

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/cornel-west-on-bernie-trump-and-racism/

> MH: And that’s to do with the man himself. You’re endorsing him as a person, as your brother. In terms of policies, is there a particular policy that you think is crucial to his campaign that makes him stand out from the rest? > > CW: No, the policies have to do — policies against militarism, policies against poverty, the critiques of Wall Street, the consistency of his call for Democratic accountability of corporate elites and financial elites and basically the greed that we see among so many of those elites. And the same is true about racism. I want to hit this issue head-on because there’s been some talk about reparations and it’s true. I’ve supported reparations. I’ve been struggling for reparations for over 40 years, but I don’t see an endorsement of reparations as the only precondition of fighting against white supremacy. There’s no doubt that his policies will benefit poor and working people and poor and working black people and brown people more than any other candidate. And so, yes, when it comes to just reparations as a whole and larger dialogue certainly, I’m for it, but I hope that a lot of black folk don’t get confused and sit back on this issue of reparations. > > MH: You think you can get him to move on reparations? Because he was asked on ABC’s The View about whether he backed it and he said well, you know, we’ve got crises in our communities and there’s other better ways to address that than by “just writing out a check.” A lot of people criticized him for that as you say, do you think he can move on that like he’s moved on other issues? That people like you persuade him to a different position? > > CW: No doubt about that, but the core is ensuring that there’s fundamental transformation in the racist system under which we live so that the lives of black and brown and yellow peoples are much better. And so, that’s the real issue. And so, it seems to me I don’t want reparations to be an issue that gets us away from him taking a stand on those issues so much better than any other of the other candidates. > > MH: So you say he takes a takes a better position on those issues than other candidates. > > CW: Oh, no doubt about it. > > MH: A lot of those liberal critics, as you know, have said for a long time, especially in recent days that he’s not good on race issues. They say he has a blind spot when it comes to race both in terms of his rhetoric, in terms of the people he surrounded himself with in the past. What do you say to those liberal critics as someone who has been writing and thinking about race and racism your whole life and yet is a Bernie supporter? > > CW: Well, one, it’s a matter of his heart. He’s an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he’s old-school. He’s like me. He doesn’t know the buzzwords. He doesn’t endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it’s true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn’t, he doesn’t say the right thing. He doesn’t use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn’t be blinded by certain kinds of words they’re looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.

-

Even Trevor Noah, owned by the PTB and regardless of the motivations, gets it and sums it up concisely:

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1110293987536093184

-

And one of the many great posters here, /u/jlalbrecht, eventually saw the light:

>Note I should have had a h/t regarding my reparations stance to both /u/ikissthisguy and my wife.

-

>cheers. Credit where it is due. You helped me see the issue from outside my personal experience, similar to how Killer Mike changed my opinion about US gun control.

Bolding mine. Try it sometime.

-

/u/jlalbrecht:

>Thanks. I'll note that my reparations stance was changed by /u/ikissthisguy and my wife from "everything Bernie has proposed up to this point" to "everything Bernie has proposed up to this point + a check and an apology." It was on the importance of this latter point where my CIS-gendered-white-male-perspective was suppressing my empathy gland.

/u/ikissthisguy:

>> empathy gland

>If only everyone had one! Or even half of our so-called representatives in government.

/u/jlalbrecht:

>Everyone has one. It is just that those of most of our elected officials are completely smothered by wheelbarrows full of cash from big donors. For those people, it takes a gay relative or similar for their empathy gland to function again.

The Color of Law shows why systemic racism and segregation is still a HUGE problem. School segregation, too.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated-and-black-children-are-paying-a-price/

Statistics, books, university courses, professional development trainings, etc.

Here are some books I have read that I can recommend on the topic:

The New Jim Crow

The Color of Law

Stamped from the Beginning

The Rise of the Warrior Cop

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Between the World and Me

So You Think I Drive a Cadillac

Best to start with this book:
https://www.amazon.com/100-Years-Lynchings-Ralph-Ginzburg/dp/0933121180

Then continue on to this book
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

One can always begin at the beginning with this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Bullwhip-Days-Slaves-Remember-History/dp/0802138683

Then frost it all by watching this afterward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8

That is America......

Honestly, I am going to sound super insensitive but it's just stuff, get over it.

It's not Oakland's fault. The community of Oakland has been trying to combat this for years and we are finally stabilizing ourselves. Many of those who worked hard to get it to where it is are now getting pushed out of our homes because Oakland is now "up and coming".

Imagine living life like this, constantly worrying about being robbed, shot at, or murdered. That's what Oakland natives had to experience for years. We are used to this. We are not happy with it but we understand that this is the reality of living in a city left impoverished through policies like redlining and moving here because we initially had no other choice.

You are wrong for hating Oakland but not hating or questioning the policies that caused the city to become the way it is.

So yes. Sorry, your stuff got robbed. Thankfully you are still alive. You are still able to complain about it on the internet. You still have the resources to go on an live a better place and put this event behind you.

Please listen more, learn more, and use your position to speak out on policies that caused you to lose your stuff. You have now experienced what thousands of us in Oakland have and honestly be happy you are alive. Hopefully, through your experience, you can gain some insight into our community and the problems we still face and are working to fix.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11648307/has-oaklands-fruitvale-neighborhood-recovered-from-redlining

https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2020/01/historically-racist-housing-policies-exacerbating-climate-change-effects-in-low-income-portland-neighborhoods.html

http://modelminority.blogspot.com/2009/04/gentrification-has-nothing-to-do-with.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/27/upshot/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-gentrification.html

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

So this thread blew up more than I expected, so I gathered some resources for you and anyone else that would like to learn more:

Streetcar/Interurban Specific:

• 99% Invisible - Episode 70 - The Great Red Car Conspiracy - Podcast episode about the LA interurban system, 99% Invisible has a ton of great urbanist content in general, so give other episodes a listen/read if you can
• Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 - I haven't read it myself but it's been on my list. Talks about how the first suburbs in America were built around streetcars and subways
• Interurban Electric Rail - Professor Roger Grant - 1:13:30 talk - Author of the book Electric Interurbans and the American People giving a talk on all aspects of the systems.

Urbanism in general:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - One of the great hallmarks of urbanist literature, Jane Jacobs assails the 1950's and 60s urban planners that were hell bent on building (racist) suburbs and literally bulldozing poor neighborhoods to run freeeways through to connect the jobs to the suburbs.
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - The flip side of the story, showing how Robert Moses was able to gain the power to push through the suburbs and highways, and how the decisions of a few white men in the mid 20th century continue to reverberate through today.
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - Talks about how zoning laws in general and suburbia specifically was created with discrimination at it's heart. Consequences of specific racist actions like redlining and blockbusting still ring loudly today.
• Literally tons more books, I can recommend more, but ask your local librarian about Urbanism and they can point you towards what you'd like to learn

There are tons of blogs, podcasts, and groups dedicated towards urbanism and city building, some here:

• 99% Invisible
• Streetsblog / Talking Headways
• The War on Cars
• Invisible City
• New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens - FB group chock full of shitposting about urbanism, tons of news articles, book recommendations, really anything and everything. Searching "NUMTOT" with another urbanism or transit topic will often yield additional search results.

I saw your replied and then deleted your comment. Here is my response: My comment was more for the other people on this thread but while I have you. Exposing yourself to political media isn't the best way to educate yourself about a subject since the media is crazy bias no matter what side you fall on. I'd recommend reading accredited books about the topic by authors who are just trying to talk about the subject NOT convince you to believe an ideology that keeps political parties in power. Really the media is scary, it's pulling us apart. Try, please try looking into some of these resources. If you say you've read them and still believe what you do, then I'll be the first to say I'm sorry.

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

https://www.amazon.com/Punishing-Race-Continuing-American-Dilemma/dp/0199926468

https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853#:~:text=The%20Color%20of%20Law%3A%20A,9781631492853%3A%20Amazon.com%3A%20Books

Educate yourself