Prof. Sachs speaks with historian Richard Rothstein about his groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, in which Rothstein explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions. Rather, he makes clear that it was the laws and policy decisions of local, state, and federal governments that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to affect Black Americans to this day.
The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.
Footnotes:
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Prof. Sachs speaks with historian Richard Rothstein about his groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, in which Rothstein explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions. Rather, he makes clear that it was the laws and policy decisions of local, state, and federal governments that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to affect Black Americans to this day.
The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.
Footnotes:
⭐️ Thank you for listening!
➡️ Sign up for the newsletter: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS
➡️ Website: bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org
🎉 Don't forget to subscribe and share your favorite episode with your friends!
📣 Leave a rating and tell us what you thought about this episode!
Jeffrey Sachs (00:03)
Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world leading authors who have written, scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justice, and the challenges of building a decent world. In this episode, I will be speaking with Richard Rothstein about his remarkable book, The Color of Law. Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight, how segregation in America–the incessant and pernicious segregation that continues to divide our society, and that contributes to so much social strife–is the byproduct of a long history of explicit government policies at all levels: federal, state, and local.
Sachs (00:56)
Thank you for being with us. You are a great historian and a fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, the Thurgood Marshall Institute, and the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley; so, many institutional affiliations. Richard, thank you for being with the Book Club.
Richard Rothstein (01:14)
Thank you very much, Jeffrey. You know, when you're an old retired guy, you get lots of useless titles. So thank you for reciting all of them.
Sachs (01:22)
Well, those are not useless, because those are important affiliations that you've had professionally through a long and very distinguished career.
Rothstein (01:30)
Thank you.
Sachs (01:31)
You wrote this book after pondering these issues of race in America, also through extensive writing about schools, as well, and segregation in schools and inequality in school outcomes. You knew a lot, but this book is so filled with unbelievable detail and facts. Was it an adventure for you writing this or shocking to learn what you found?
Rothstein (01:58)
Well, nobody writes a book without having an idea that you're going to come up with something useful after spending all that time. But what I was shocked about was not the individual instances of state-sponsored segregation of this society, but the way in which this was a system with so many different federal, state, and local policies, all racially explicit, that were designed to ensure that African Americans and whites could not live near one another in any metropolitan area. It was the system that shocked me. 60 years ago, I was a research assistant at the Chicago Urban League, and involved in a lawsuit that the Chicago Urban League was pursuing against the Chicago housing authority for creating housing for African Americans in Black neighborhoods and housing for whites in white neighborhoods. This was in the period when public housing was white, as well as Black, but always segregated.
As time moved on, it became clear that was one way of containing Blacks, without having them interfere or disrupt the so-called sustained all-white communities. In other words, the ghettos in the sky, send them upward where they wouldn't run into anybody but God. I say to you, very frankly, and very sincerely. No other city has given the Black brothers and sisters the greatest opportunity that they've had in Chicago.
So I had an idea from throughout my adult life, that there was something going on there more than this myth we have of de facto segregation, that there was some federal involvement in it. But I had no idea of the extent to which the many policies that were implemented and how they reinforce each other at all levels of government to create an apartheid society that we have today in this country.
Sachs (03:58)
I think that is the overpowering story that you tell is how many different actions were taken at the local level, the state level, the federal level, by agencies, by courts, by police, by special housing authorities and housing agencies, to create this kind of segregated nation that we have. And because we have people listening from all parts of the world, and also from all different backgrounds, I think it would be great to start with the difference of de facto segregation and de jure segregation and what your argument is in this book.
Rothstein (04:40)
Sure. As you noted, Jeffrey, we have a myth in this country, and it's widely shared by Democrats and Republicans, by Blacks and whites, by liberals and conservatives, by Northerners and Southerners. The notion is that the reason we have a segregated society is because of private activity, because private homeowners or landlords refuse to rent or sell to African Americans in white neighborhoods, or maybe businesses in the private economy like banks or real estate agencies or developers discriminated in how they carried out their work. It's all of these individual bigoted but non-governmental decisions is the reason we have segregation. It's very different, we tell ourselves, from the government required segregation that we had in the 20th century of schools or lunch counters or buses. We give a name to this myth, as you say, we call it de facto segregation. It has enormous consequences, this belief, because if it's de facto segregation, something that was created by private activity, not governmentally created, it's not a civil rights violation. It's not a violation of the Constitution. If government were doing it, as it was in all the institutions that were segregated in the 20th century, if the federal government was doing it, it was a Fifth Amendment violation, when, for example, it was segregating interstate transportation. When state and local governments were doing it was a Fourteenth Amendment violation when they were segregating schools or lunch counters or public facilities. And we understand that if we have a constitutional violation, a civil rights violation, we have an obligation as American citizens to remedy it.
Sachs (06:22)
So that is de jure segregation, by law.
Rothstein (06:25)
That's correct. If it's not government sponsored, if it's simply de facto, then we have no obligation to remedy it. We may think it's too bad, but we don't have any obligation to remedy under our Constitution. So the historical account of how government created this segregation is absolutely essential to how we move forward. Because the myth of de facto segregation paralyzes our ability to fix it. If we understand that it's government created, then we have, as American citizens, to accept an obligation to fix it. And as you said, the consequences of these 20th century policies are with us still today. It's not just a historical curiosity. If I can take a minute and explain just one of them that has enormous consequences. In the post-World War II period, millions of returning war veterans were coming home needing housing. The Federal Housing Administration embarked on a program to move all of the white returning war veterans, as well as other working-class families, into all-white single family home suburbs, and prohibit African Americans from doing so. And that the time as, many of your viewers or listeners may know, we were an urban society. There were very few people living in suburbs prior to that post-war period. We were a manufacturing economy and factories had to be located near deep-water ports or railroad terminals to get their parts or ship their final products. So, you had both Black and white workers living in downtown urban areas much more integrated than they are today. We'd be stunned if we were transported back to that time to see the extent of downtown urban integration that we had. Well, the federal government, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration, embarked on a program to move the whites out of those urban areas into single family homes in all white suburbs and prohibit African Americans from doing so. And I'm sure you're familiar with many of these suburbs, they're all over the country. Every metropolitan area has them.
Sachs (08:24)
I grew up in Detroit, so I'm completely familiar with that because Detroit is almost the paradigmatic case of this.
Rothstein (08:30)
Well, I don't want to disillusion you, Jeffrey. But every place I've gone to people tell me that their community is the paradigmatic case of segregation. Detroit has no monopoly on that.
Take Levittown, which is the one that I talk about most in this book, east of New York City. Levitt was a bigot. He wouldn't have sold homes in Levittown to African Americans if he had the choice. But he couldn't build the homes on his own. He went to banks, nobody would lend them the money.
Sachs (08:58)
We should describe that image of what Levittown is, which is the post-World War II house side-by-side-by-side in a new development.
[Media] (09:07)
[Music] Now, let's go to Levittown. A modern garden community in Long Island, New York, a community designed for modern living.
Rothstein (09:26)
17,000 homes in one place, no bank would be crazy enough to lend Levitt the money to do this. The only way you could do it was by going to the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration, submitting his proposal for this development, including a required commitment that they never sell a home to an African American. The Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration even required Levitt and developers like this all over the country, to place a clause in the deed of every home prohibiting resale to African Americans or rental to African Americans. Once he made those commitments. The Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration guaranteed his bank loans permitting him to build this project. Now I say he was a bigot. But is this private discrimination? No! If the federal government had said to him, "We'll guarantee your bank loans on condition that you sell without discrimination," like it or not he would have had to do it. And that's why I say that although he was a bigot, this was a federally required condition.
The reason that's with us today is those homes at the time in Levittown, and in communities all over the country, they sold at the time for, well, in about 1950 was about $9,000 a piece, about twice average median income, median family income, about $100,000 in today's inflation adjusted dollars. Those homes no longer sell for $100,000 anywhere in the country, in any of the suburbs, not in Detroit, not in New York, not in San Francisco. They're now 300, 400, 500,000 dollars. I wrote an article a few months ago, in The [New York] Times about this community, an all-white community created in the 1940s, where the homes now sell for a million and a half dollars, $100,000 homes. The white families who moved into those homes, with this federal subsidy, gained, of course, equity, wealth from the appreciation of the value of their homes over the next couple of generations. African Americans were prohibited, prohibited by explicit federal racial policy from participating in this wealth-generating program. The result is that today, African American incomes, on average, are about 60% of white incomes. African American household wealth is about 5% of white household wealth, and that enormous disparity between a 60% income ratio and a 5% wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy that continues to determine the racial landscape of today and so much more of our inequality. That wealth gap is responsible for achievement gaps in schools, for health disparities between African Americans and whites, for the continued inability of African Americans today to move into communities that they could have afforded to move into 60-70 years ago.
Sachs (12:27)
The case that this is a created system is overpowering, and the message of the book is so striking. If we could go back to the start for a moment, especially for all the Book Club listeners joining from all over the world. Can you explain what the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments are, very briefly, just to give a picture of what America claims to be on paper or in our constitutional order, so that we can then contrast it with the many ways that it is not what it claims to be?
Rothstein (13:02)
Sure, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is the amendment that requires all Americans to be treated with due process and equal protection of the law. And so, if the federal government requires that a developer not sell to African Americans, it's violating its Fifth Amendment responsibilities: it's a constitutional violation, a civil rights violation. The Fourteenth Amendment applies those Fifth Amendment protections to the states and to their local governments, as well as requiring that African Americans–freed slaves and their descendants–get full citizenship rights in this country.
Sachs (13:47)
And just to be clear to the listeners that the Fourteenth Amendment together with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
Rothstein (13:56)
That's correct. And so, the Fourteenth Amendment requires state and local governments to treat all citizens equally, in the same way that the Fifth Amendment requires the federal government to do it. The Thirteenth Amendment is actually quite interesting and gets a lot less attention these days.
Sachs (14:13)
Yeah, that was fascinating to read about that. So please explain that.
Rothstein (14:18)
The Thirteenth Amendment not only prohibited slavery, it ended slavery in this country at the end of the Civil War, but also required that the characteristics of slavery be prohibited. In other words, it prohibited any form of second-class citizenship in this country. So, all of the activities that you and I have been talking about implemented by federal, state, and local governments to require segregation were also a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits second class citizenship. These are all examples of second-class citizenship, when African Americans don't have the same rights to purchase or rent property or sell property that whites have. Two different classes of citizenship.
Sachs (15:03)
One of the stories or threads running through the book is how inconsistent the Supreme Court is in recognizing those rights. The Supreme Court is supposed to be the upholder of these constitutional values. And I think it's right to say that the Thirteenth Amendment, which as you say, was to eliminate the vestiges of slavery, when the Supreme Court looked at that, I believe it was in 1883, if I remember from the book, said, "No, that doesn't apply to housing." But that's a story that you tell repeatedly, how disappointing, the Supreme Court is, on so many occasions, basically reflecting the bigotry in the country rather than the constitutional order.
Rothstein (15:48)
Well, as you noted earlier, when you introduced me, before I got to this topic about 10 years ago, I was an education policy writer. The biggest problem facing American public schools today was their segregation, where we concentrate the most disadvantaged young people in single schools, where their social and economic disadvantages overwhelm the ability of the schools to focus on instruction, the way they can in a school where children come healthy and well-rested and well-nourished and in secure homes. I realized that the schools are segregated because the neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated. And then in 2007, I read the Supreme Court decision that evaluated two school districts that were attempting in a very trivial way to address the segregation of their students. Seattle, Washington was one; Louisville, Kentucky was another. Both of those districts allowed parents to choose the school within the district that their child would attend, but if their choice was going to exacerbate the segregation of the school, that choice would not be honored in favor the choice of a child who wouldn't. So, if you had one place left in the school in an all-white school, and both a Black and a white child applied for that last remaining place, the Black child would be given some preference. It was a very trivial program. Supreme Court announced that–this was 2007–said you couldn't do such a thing. The decision was written by the Chief Justice John Roberts,
Sachs (17:15)
My classmate, by the way.
Rothstein (17:17)
Well, I don't know that I'd be so proud of that, if I were you.
Sachs (17:22)
I'm not proud of it. I'm just recording it.
Rothstein (17:25)
Anyhow, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the decision. He acknowledged that the schools in Louisville and Seattle were segregated.
[Media] (17:31)
How can plans such as these that look at individual children and say, you cannot come to this school if you are Black, or you cannot come to this school, if you are white, be said to be determining admission on a nonracial basis, or schools that did not segregate on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation such as Jefferson County? The way "to achieve a system of determining admission to public schools on a nonracial basis is to stop assigning students on a racial basis." We conclude that these racial classifications violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore reverse the judgments of the Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and remand for further proceedings.
Rothstein (18:21)
I read this decision and you know, as you can tell, I've been around a while, so I remembered some years before reading about something that happened in Louisville, Kentucky, one of those two school districts. There was a white homeowner in an all white suburb called Shively, outside Louisville, one of those kinds of suburbs that the FHA created that I described before. This white homeowner and had an African American friend who was living in downtown Louisville renting an apartment, had a wife and a child. He was a decorated Navy veteran, had a decent income, wanted to buy a single family home, but nobody would sell him one. So the white homeowner in this suburb of Louisville, bought a second home in his community and resold it to his African American friend. The only way you could buy one. The African American family moved in, an angry white mob surrounded by the police, protected by the police rather, surrounded the home, threw rocks through the windows, the police made no effort to stop it; they dynamited and firebombed the home.
[Media] (19:24)
Well, the first thing that happened was they moved in. The man who sold it to him was shot and he tried to buy it back and they wouldn't do it. A cross was burned across the street from the Bradens' house, or the house that the Bradens had bought for the Wades. And I guess you know that a fiery cross is encouragement for a lynching. Right. And they shot out the windows. And then the house was bought...
Rothstein (20:00)
But when the riot was all over, the state of Kentucky arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed with a 15-year sentence, the white homeowner for sedition for having sold a home in a white neighborhood to a Black family. And I said to myself, you know, the police are state agents. The courts are state agents. The prosecutors of the whole criminal justice system are state agents. This isn't de facto segregation. I said to myself, this must be something about the history of Louisville that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn't understand. And that's when I began to look into it further, I found that there were hundreds and hundreds of examples in this country in the post-war period into the 1960s, even 70s, of police-protected sometimes even police-organized and led violence designed and effective in doing so to drive African Americans out of homes that they had legitimately purchased or rented in white communities. Every one of these was a constitutional or Fourteenth Amendment violation of the police. The segregation of Louisville is not de facto. This was just one of many, many federal, state, and local policies that were implemented. I found it wasn't only state sponsored violence that ensured that African Americans and whites could not live near one another in any metropolitan area. But there were many, many of these policies that we talked about just a few of them so far.
Sachs (21:24)
So, the Supreme Court willfully neglected the absolute clear statement of the lower court and just declared, It just happened. Nobody's responsible. Rather stunning, isn't it? It's amazing.
Rothstein (21:43)
Well, it's stunning only if you have a misplaced faith in the Supreme Court.
Sachs (21:48)
At the time of Earl Warren's Supreme Court, it was bred in me to have faith in the Supreme Court. Of course, it gets knocked devout with lots of counterexamples. But when it's so striking that the Supreme Court is to base decisions on the fact base, which is what a lower court develops, and then completely neglects the fact base to make an assertion about the facts. It's more blatant that I'm used to.
Rothstein (22:18)
Well, you know, one of the things that's curious is that the Warren Court was an aberration in the history of this country. It lasted only for about 15 years, the most where it took these constitutional rights seriously. But it had such a powerful impact on the thinking of intellectuals and scholars, that people remain surprised that in other periods, the Supreme Court did not have this view. The fact is that throughout American history, the Supreme Court has been one of the primary defenders of the violation of the rights of African Americans. The Warren Court was a brief period in this country's history where it had a different view. And we should not be misled by taking this one brief 15-year period and thinking that that's the norm. That's not the norm. The norm is the opposite.
Sachs (23:16)
It's so poignant, what you say. So let's talk a little bit about American history in this. You've brought us through the post-Civil War amendments. And we vaguely know, even if we're not the scholar you are on the history, that after the short period of Reconstruction in the south, the South became an apartheid society, a Jim Crow society. But your book explains that that was a national phenomenon, and that as African Americans migrated to the North, starting in the 20th century, mainly World War I, World War II, that same apartheid spread throughout the nation. We've learned this year, more than we remembered, or perhaps, knew, but should have known, how racist Woodrow Wilson was. And you talk about Wilson as introducing segregation to the federal employment system. Maybe you could say a word about Woodrow Wilson, since his name just came off the School of Public Policy at Princeton for these reasons.
[Media] (24:28)
Princeton University announced today it will remove the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school because of his racist views. The move reverses a decision by the Ivy League school in New Jersey four years ago to keep the name. Now Wilson was President of the university before becoming the governor of New Jersey and then President of the United States in 1913. He supported segregation, barred Black students from Princeton, and spoke approvingly of the Ku Klux Klan.
Rothstein (25:00)
Wilson was the first Southern segregationist Democrat to be elected to the presidency after the Civil War. Of course, he had moved to New Jersey and that was the perch from which he rose to the presidency, but he was a southerner. Prior to Wilson's presidency in 1913, the Federal Civil Service was an integrated civil service. Blacks and whites working in integrated settings. It was a small civil service. We didn't have the large federal government that we had today, but it was an integrated civil service, and the Wilson administration embarked on a program to segregate, for the first time, the federal civil service. They put up curtains in federal office buildings to separate Black and white clerical workers. They fired African Americans who were in supervisory positions because it was no longer permitted for an African American civil servant to supervise a white civil servant. These people were dismissed. They built separate washroom facilities for African Americans in basements of federal office buildings. Well, the reason I told this story was because one of the largest federal departments at that time was the Navy department. And the official responsible for segregating the Navy department's offices was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who was Franklin Roosevelt. Now, I'm not suggesting that segregating the Navy departments was FDR's idea, Franklin Roosevelt's idea. I don't even know if he liked it. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. The point is that this was the environment of the Democratic Party in which he grew up, in which he matured, in which he became a politically powerful leader of the Democratic Party. And so it's not surprising that the New Deal, the Democratic administration of FDR, implemented policies of segregation throughout the country. Now African Americans, as you probably know, did not on the whole support the election of FDR in 1932. They voted for Herbert Hoover, the Republican, because the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, the party that had emancipated slaves. The Democratic Party was the party of segregation. By 1936, African Americans flipped in President Roosevelt's first reelection. And they flipped because the federal government, for the first time in history, gave economic benefits to African Americans. They were always segregated. But the Republicans were not the party of segregation, but they also were not the party of economic security. The Democrats were the party of economic security on a segregated basis. And African Americans voted for the party that gave them employment benefits, that gave them housing, always on a segregated basis. You mentioned the South and how this is not a southern problem. It's not an all a southern problem. It's a national problem. And it's particularly acute in the North. In the Color of Law, I like where I can to talk about some self-satisfied, smug places that think they're better than others. So Cambridge, Massachusetts–
Sachs (28:00)
That one hit home. We both have Harvard roots, and I took off my headphones because I was listening to the audio book, and turned to my wife and said, "Cambridge, my god! Our Cambridge, Massachusetts!"
Rothstein (28:16)
Right. Well, the area between Harvard and MIT, in the 1930s was a fully integrated community, a central square neighborhood, for the reasons I talked about before, that we had integrated neighborhoods in that period of time. The federal government went into that central square neighborhood, demolished integrated housing and built two separate projects, one for whites, one for African Americans, creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed, and with other public projects elsewhere in the Boston metropolitan area, contributed to it, as well. In San Francisco–this is something that happens throughout the country–hundreds of thousands of workers, Black and white, flocked to centers of war production during World War II to take jobs in war industries that hadn't previously existed. They overwhelmed the communities to which they migrated to take these jobs and if the federal government wanted the war material to be produced–the tanks, the ships, the aircraft carriers, the planes–it had to provide housing for workers in these war plants. And it did, everywhere creating segregated housing for war workers who were working in the same war plants, in the same shipyards. I mention San Francisco because the West Coast did not have a substantial African American population before World War II.
Historians divide up the migration of African Americans out of the former slaveholding states into the rest of the country into two big periods. The first Great Migration around World War I did not affect the West Coast, very few African Americans came to the West Coast at that time. It was only the second Great Migration that began in World War II. So when African Americans came to take jobs in the shipyards, and in other war industries on the West Coast, there were very few African Americans already living there. There was no pattern of segregation. The federal government created that pattern in the segregation de novo on the West Coast. In San Francisco, the federal government built five projects for shipyard workers. Four were for whites only. One was for African Americans placed in a neighborhood that then became the Black neighborhood of San Francisco. Same thing happened in Los Angeles: Watts was not a Black neighborhood before World War II. It became a Black neighborhood because that's where the federal government placed housing for war workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, in Seattle, in Portland, up and down the West Coast. That's why it's a segregated society today on the West Coast solely because of these policies of the federal government during World War II to create segregated patterns where they hadn't previously existed. Berkeley is another good example of that, where there was a segregated project in Berkeley and in the suburb just north of Berkeley called Albany, where the whites were given buildings in the residential area and the African Americans were given separate buildings in the industrial area, even though they were working in the same shipyards.
Sachs (31:18)
When you pointed out a few minutes ago, the state-sanctioned violence where the police stand around or arrest the African Americans when there are mobs attacking them, then the job discrimination, hiring, training, wage levels, the tax assessments, well, my God, it is...I think the overwhelming message is this is an apartheid system. This is not an accident. It is not localized. It is not a perversity. It is a system. And I'm sorry to say how naive I was about some of this having lived through it all my life and seen it and bemoaned it. We talked about how whites supported Trump disproportionately and the bigotry that he represented in his administration; that the suburbs went for Trump, I should say.
[Media] (32:12)
As far as I'm concerned, if you hate our country, if you're not happy here, you can leave. That's what I said in a tweet, which I guess some people think is controversial. A lot of people love it, by the way, a lot of people love it. Among those who love it, white supremacists. One prominent website today saying this is the kind of white nationalism we elected him for.
Sachs (32:33)
But then you realize from your book, the suburbs were created for exactly that reason. It's not incidental that suburbs vote for racist policies; the suburbs were created for the purpose of segregation. So, this is our legacy politically–you've talked about our legacy economically, you've talked about our legacy in terms of wealth distribution in the economy–but our political legacy is we created the very divisions of structure between the urban mostly "blue" or Democratic voting areas and the suburban white Republican voting areas that support the ongoing apartheid system, as it were. I found it, just chapter after chapter, if it doesn't work this way, try it the next way, because it's bound to work one of these ways.
Rothstein (33:31)
Well, it worked in all of those ways. Every one of these–as I said, at the very beginning– every one of these was a piece of a system, no one of which would have been enough on its own. But it was a system of federal, state, and local policies, zoning regulations at the local level that were explicitly racial, or even if not explicitly, so clearly intended to be racial, that it was a system at all levels of government, where each part reinforced the other.
Sachs (33:59)
Let's turn to the crucial discussion at the end about remedies. You say the government has created this; the Constitution requires remedies. And there's a huge debate in this country. There are proponents of reparations. You say you don't want reparations, but you want effective remedies.
Rothstein (34:19)
Well, I think when you say I don't support reparations, it's because reparations are typically misunderstood because most people think of reparations as a single monetary payment to the current generation. And it would inevitably be token. I mentioned before the enormous wealth gap that's been created between African Americans and whites: no reparations program would be substantial enough on its own to close that. So, it would be a token payment, and people would say, okay, we've now taken care of it. Let's move on. We don't need to do anything more. So, as you say, I'm in favor of remedies, which include, in some cases, substantial expenditures, but also many, many policies that require no expenditures at all. So, for example, let me give the example of the suburbanization that we've been talking about as one of these policies, the suburbs that sold at the mid 20th century for $100,000 a piece where homes sold for that amount to white homeowners and now are selling for $300, $400, $500,000. We should have an affirmative action program in housing that, for example, the federal government should be buying up homes in a place like Levittown for what they currently cost, market rates at $300, $400, $500,000 and reselling them to qualified African Americans for something closer to the $100,000 that they would have paid, that their families would have paid, had they been permitted to buy them. That would be a narrowly targeted remedy for a very specific constitutional violation. Something that costs nothing at all would be a program that prohibited zoning ordinances that effectively exclude working class, middle class African Americans from all-white suburbs. I'm not a lawyer, but unfortunately, I know more about the law in this area than many lawyers do.
Sachs (36:12)
Certainly than the Supreme Court does.
Rothstein (36:15)
Yeah. So, seems to me that a zoning ordinance that perpetuates an unconstitutionally created segregation is itself subject to challenge and zoning ordinances that prohibit in all-white single family homes, suburbs, even townhouses, garden apartments, low level multifamily units that would easily fit into the residential environment, duplexes, triplexes; zoning ordinances that prohibit those are perpetuating an unconstitutionally created segregation, and should be challenged on that basis. That costs nothing at all to do that. So, we have a range of policies that should be enacted. The things I just described cannot be enacted because there's no political support, but there's a possibility of building political support. We had you know, in this last year after the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country, some 20 million Americans taking part in racial justice demonstrations.
[Media] (37:13)
I am shaking as I–this has got to stop–we are sick of it–we need conviction–I just want us all to live–the death will not stop until the powers that be are finally held accountable–don't look away from the truth until every one of us are free from white supremacy- the world stands with you-[unintelligible]. The criminalizing and killing of black and brown bodies is not new, it is old as America. It's just getting filmed more.
Rothstein (37:40)
The participants were overwhelmingly white, if you talk about that 20 million. So we're having a more accurate and passionate discussion about race now than we ever have had in American history really. And so what this new movement to redress racial segregation is attempting to do is create committees to begin to take action in their local communities, to begin the process of redressing segregation and creating the political basis for first local and then national policy. And I think that the Black Lives Matter demonstrations indicate that there is the possibility today for the similar kinds of political support if it's mobilized properly.
Sachs (38:21)
I want us to end on that positive and exciting note, thank you for helping to lead a new movement to redress racial injustice. The Book Club has listeners from all over the world. I'm sure that this discussion resonates in so many parts of the world, because injustices across ethnic, racial, and religious lines are pervasive in the world.
[Media] (38:45)
This is the watershed moment that has brought the world to its knees. This is the moment for liberation. We honor the legacy of all those who have come before us. Harriet, Fanny, Ella, James, Martin, Malcolm, Angela, Marcia, and we continue the tradition of revolution. We feel the earth shifting beneath our feet. We saw with our own eyes, the oppression, no inclusion. They're dying. The pain everywhere, every day. We fell to our knees. We can't breathe. But we rise up, using our voices and creativity. In cities in every state across America and around the world, we say, Black Lives Matter. It's time to transform. We are united. We are loud. And we are strong. We are galvanized in a global effort to fight for liberty, justice and freedom. And we are not done. Together, change is coming.
Sachs (40:17)
Please join me next time when we will discuss a profound book by a remarkable historian, my colleague at Columbia University, Professor Rashid Khalidi. His book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, recounts his family's personal history and the political history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has been raging for more than a century.
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