A review by bibliophage
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

challenging informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

“One reason low-income African Americans are less upwardly mobile than low-income whites is that low-income African Americans are more likely to be stuck for multiple generations in poor neighborhoods. Patrick Sharkey, a New York University sociologist, analyzed data on race and neighborhood conditions and reported his findings in a 2013 book, Stuck in Place.  He finds that young African Americans (from thirteen to twenty-eight years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young whites—66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites. He finds that 67 percent of African American families hailing from the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago continue to live in such neighborhoods today. But only 40 percent of white families who lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago still do so. Forty-eight percent of African American families, at all income levels, have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families. If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for African Americans. Neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational for African Americans and more episodic for whites.”
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Richard Rothstein shows here that laws and policy decisions at local, state, and federal levels, not de facto segregation, have led to discriminatory patterns  that continue to divide our neighborhoods today. Rothstein clearly illustrates how the fear of diminishing property value and exclusive zoning laws and ordinances have disproportionately affected African Americans. While this information is not necessarily new, the comprehensive delivery here is eloquent and articulate and the research impressive. It is impossible to finish this read without dwelling on the immense chasm of inequality in our country–-that was state and federally sponsored long after the era of Civil Rights and de-segregation. Some of the cases presented in Rothstein's pages are astonishing. When will we change?National Book Award for Nonfiction Nominee 2017