Date and Time:
Location:
Address:
Richard Rothstein
Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute Fellow, Haas Institute, UC Berkeley and at Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
In his highly-acclaimed 2017 book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America — the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much recent social strife — is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal level. To scholars and social critics, racism in our neighborhoods has long been viewed as a manifestation of unscrupulous real estate agents, unethical mortgage lenders, and exclusionary covenants working outside the law. This is what is commonly known as “de facto segregated,” practices that were the outcome of private, not legal or public policy, means. Yet, as Mr. Rothstein breaks down in case after case, until the last quarter of the twentieth century de facto paled in comparison to de jure (government-sponsored) segregation.
A former columnist for the New York Times and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, as well as a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a Fellow of the Haas Institute at the University of California–Berkeley, Mr. Rothstein has spent years documenting the evidence that government not merely ignored discriminatory practices in the residential sphere but promoted them. The impact has been devastating for generations of African-Americans who were denied the right to live where they wanted to live and raise and school their children where they thought best. While the Fair Housing Act in 1968 provided modest enforcement to prevent future discrimination, it did nothing to reverse or undo a century’s worth of state-sanctioned violations of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Thirteenth Amendment which banned treating former slaves as second-class citizens. The structural conditions established by 20th century federal policy endure to this day in all municipalities, large and small, liberal and reactionary.
NOTE: Mr Rothstein spoke at two FAN events on March 21, 2018.
Event 1: 12:00 PM, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, 25 E. Pearson St., Chicago.
Event 2: 7:00 PM, Evanston Township High School Auditorium, 1600 Dodge Ave., Evanston.
Upcoming Events
How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
Jodi Kantor
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author
ON ZOOM
Backtalker: An American Memoir
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum
Beth E. Richie, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Black Studies and the Inaugural Chair in Social Sciences and the Humanities at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Ph.D.
James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
Imani Perry, JD, Ph.D.
Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute
ON ZOOM
