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In the spirit of this year's word "Both...and," I bring you this book. It's important to avoid falling into binary thought, the idea that because I love my country it has never done wrong. If individual people are made up of both good and bad and countries are made up of individual people, then wouldn't it stand to reason that countries sometimes do bad things? This is an oversimplification of a grave injustice done to Black Americans, but it's so, so important to study American history rather than American mythology.

Late in the book Rothstein quotes a textbook as saying something akin to "African-Americans found themselves living in segregated communities."

Um...they just woke up one day and bam! Segregation. No, I don't think so. I think that's a sentence purposely phrased in the passive voice to undercut the actuality of the situation: government policies combined with the overt racism of lots of white folks intentionally segregated communities, a practice that has had devastating consequences for Black folks in particular.

To sum up Rothstein in a nonacademic way--and one that will miss some key points because I accidentally took this book back to the library before I wrote this review:

1. The early end of Reconstruction meant that the formerly enslaved were pushed into the lowest paying jobs, many of which exploited them. See cropping, share.
2. Woodrow Wilson started this idea of home ownership specifically as a way to segregate communities.
3. Federal policies insured that only white people could take advantage of these opporuntities. Only white folks could get a mortgage. Zoning ordinances and neighborhood "covenants" expressly forbid Black people from moving into middle class neighborhoods even if those families had the means.
4. Governments worked with realtors to steer white families to white neighborhoods and Black families to Black neighborhoods. It was assumed that property values would go down due to nothing more than the color of a person's skin.
5. White families were able to take advantage of government programs for favorable mortgages as well as the GI bill in order to build up generational wealth. Black families were barred from these same programs.
6. Interstate systems and other "community" projects were used to further segregate communities, always pushing people of color into smaller, poor neighborhoods with crappier schools and pushing shite families out to the suburbs with nicer schools.
7. Precedence was given to highway construction rather than mass transportation which further kept Black folks isolated in poorer neighborhoods.
8. When middle class Black families attempted to integrate neighborhoods, especially in the postWWII era when housing was scarce, violent mobs kept them from doing so. The police did nothing--or they charged the folks who integrated with inciting violence rather than charging the mobs who were throwing rocks, putting burning crosses in lawns, setting houses on fire, tossing bombs.

Now, I want to pause here, and I'm going to put this in all caps because it's incredibly important:

THESE POLICIES WERE NOT LIMITED TO THE SOUTH. SAN FRANCISCO, ST LOUIS, CHICAGO, NYC, BALTIMORE, AND JUST ABOUT EVERYWHERE ELSE YOU CAN THINK OF used government policies as well as local ordinances to maintain segregation. To lay it all at the feet of the South is to ignore the larger problem.

That larger problem is that segregated housing has impacted the education, generational wealth, and community of Black Americans. As Rothstein points out, other minorities particularly immigrant communities have chosen to live in like-minded communities but only Black Americans have been kept from housing due to federal policy.

This book also reminded me of the book Hot, Hot Chicken which goes into detail about how these housing policies affected Nashville. What always kills me are stories of "urban renewal" that leveled vibrant, middle class Black neighborhoods. These policies were systematic and cruel.

And I know I left out a ton of information. I'd recommend reading this book yourself, but gird your loins for some very academic language. I'm half-tempted to do a video series where I could describe books like this for folks who are either too busy to read dense prose or who simply don't like "school." I loved school, and I still love learning. As you can see from the length of this review, I MADE some time even though I'm on deadline.