Did segregation in America ever really end?

The United States is still reckoning with its history of racism. For a century after slavery ended, US businesses, banks, schools, and neighborhoods were segregated by race. It took a series of Supreme Court cases and acts of Congress to legally ban discrimination based on race, but discrimination isn’t just a switch that can be turned from “on” to “off.”  The legacy of these unfair laws still affect Black Americans today.

One example of this is is a method of housing discrimination called “redlining”. It refers to the practice of banks and federal agencies denying loans for homes in neighborhoods deemed too “high risk”, which was often code for “not white.” This made it harder for Black Americans to buy homes, which made it harder to accrue generational wealth. As a result, Black Americans are more likely to live in neighborhoods with lower property values.  And in a country where public schools are funded by property taxes, this is a difficult cycle to break. In effect, the United States is still segregated, but unofficially.

Richard Rothstein has been studying this disparity for a long time. He wrote about it in his book The Color of Law. On this episode of UnTextbooked, producer Jonathan Dabel interviews Mr. Rothstein about the lasting effects of redlining on Black Americans.

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

Guest: Richard Rothstein, PhD, Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Producer: Jonathan Dabel

Music: Silas Bohen and Coleman Hamilton

Editors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman