Quotes from Richard Rothstein

ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. No other term succinctly describes this combination of characteristics, so I use the term as well.†

The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate

In 1953, the Supreme Court ended this circumvention of Shelley . It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded state courts not only from evicting African Americans from homes purchased in defiance of a restrictive covenant but also from adjudicating suits to recover damages from property owners who made such sales. Still, the a Court refused to declare that such private contracts were unlawful or even that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds that included them.

Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot

In New Jersey, for example, Governor Harold Hoffman refused to allow any camps for African American corps members because of what he termed "local resentment." The national CCC director, Robert Fechner, implemented a policy never to "force colored companies on localities that have openly declared their opposition to them.

Vito Marcantonio of New York, who argued on the House floor that "you have no right to use housing against civil rights. . . . Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.

Most segregation does fall into the category of open and explicit government-sponsored segregation

Across the Northeast and the Midwest, the PWA imposed segregation on integrated communities.

Parents' economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so once government prevented African Americans from fully participating in the mid-twentieth-century free labor market, depressed incomes became, for many, a multigenerational trait.

The value of white working- and middle-class families' suburban housing appreciated substantially over the years, resulting in vast wealth differences between whites and blacks that helped to define permanently our racial living arrangements. Because parents can bequeath assets to their children, the racial wealth gap is even more persistent down through the generations than income differences.

The USHA manual warned that it was undesirable to have projects for white families "in areas now occupied for Negroes" and added: "The aim of the [local housing] authority should be the preservation rather than the disruption of community social structures which best fit the desires of the groups concerned.

A result of the government program, therefore, was the increased population density that turned the African American neighborhoods into slums.

Frequently, the African Americans who attempted to pioneer the integration of white middle-class neighborhoods were of higher social status than their white neighbors, and they were rarely of lower status.

We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamiliarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues. Racial polarization stemming from our separateness has corrupted our politics, permitting leaders who ignore the interests of white working-class voters to mobilize them with racial appeals.

Desegregation would attempt to reverse a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state, and local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate. Too few whites were terribly concerned with that kind of social engineering, and it's a bit unseemly to make that objection now.

Popularized by Supreme Court majorities from the 1970s to the present, the de facto segregation myth has now been adopted by conventional opinion, liberal and conservative alike.

Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.

In the years since the 1926 Supreme Court ruling, numerous white suburbs in towns across the country have adopted exclusionary zoning ordinances to prevent low-income families from residing in their midst. Frequently, class snobbishness and racial prejudice were so intertwined that when suburbs adopted such ordinances, it was impossible to disentangle their motives and to prove that the zoning rules violated constitutional prohibitions of racial discrimination.

One leaflet, distributed in white neighborhoods but pretending to be addressed to African Americans, suggested that a vote for Frankensteen would bring black families to white communities. It read: NEGROES CAN LIVE ANYWHERE WITH FRANKENSTEEN MAYOR. NEGROES – DO YOUR DUTY NOV. 6.

Vito Marcantonio of New York, who argued on the the House floor that "you have no right to use housing against civil rights...Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.

Because our majority culture has tended to think of African Americans as inferior, the words we've used to describe them, no matter how dignified they seem when first employed, eventually sound like terms of contempt. African Americans react and insist on new terminology, which we eventually accept, until it too seems to connote inferiority.

Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)