Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” was an exacting look at how U.S. government policies created and then maintained housing discrimination. A research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rothstein wrote about how state-sanctioned redlining had separated and effectively devalued the residences and lives of Black people.
His book was a major success and was longlisted for the National Book Award for nonfiction. But Rothstein explained that wherever he went to give lectures about “The Color of Law,” he was constantly asked what can be done about the situation now?
Last year he came out with a new book, “Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law,” which he hopes answers that question. Written by Rothstein and his daughter, Leah Rothstein, who is a housing policy expert, “Just Action” strongly urges readers to understand the housing policies that continue to circumscribe the neighborhoods we live in today.
The book encourages readers to recognize unjust laws and simply not obey them, in the same manner that President Abraham Lincoln declared he would not abide by the 1857 Dred Scott case ruling. When the Supreme Court found that African Americans could not be accepted as U.S. citizens and said that slavery should not be legally overturned in the Dred Scott case, “Lincoln urged Americans not to obey it,” the Rothsteins write in their book. “He [Lincoln] said he expected the decision to be overturned in rulings that followed the dissenters’ arguments and therefore it should not now be respected. Implicit in his prediction was that a future court could repudiate Dred Scott only if it considered new cases that arose in defiance of the earlier decision.”
Richard Rothstein recently spoke with the Amsterdam News about “Just Action.” The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Amsterdam News: Between you and your daughter, have you guys been approached or have you been able to speak with any legislators about efforts to change U.S. housing laws?
Rothstein: No. The theme of “Just Action” is not that these are policy ideas for legislators. Our view is that there is no political support today for the kinds of reforms that are necessary to redress segregation. What “Just Action” is about is the kinds of policies and reforms and programs that can be enacted at a local level if people just band together to press for them.
So, the book “Just Action” is not addressed to legislators. It’s addressed to the 20 million people who took part in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 and who went home and put Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns but did nothing further because they didn’t know what to do.
“Just Action” describes program after program in a local community that can make a significant difference in the redress of segregation if only those people who claim, and I think legitimately claim, that they think Black Lives Matter.
AmNews: It’s very cool that you’re talking about a lot of community groups that are doing good work… reparative work. But once we have enough groups doing that kind of work, just to sort of take the other side, would that be a way of saying that well then there’s no need for African American reparations in this country?
Rothstein: Well, we talk about remedies for unconstitutional violations of African Americans’ rights in the housing field and of course it’s going to be a long process. I don’t think that even if people read “Just Action” and everybody who reads it joins a group to press for one or the other of the policies and programs we’ve described, that this is going to happen overnight. What we’re looking for and what we’re recommending in “Just Action” is beginning, starting somewhere.
I’ll give you an example: One of the things that we argue in “Just Action” is that although the segregation of this country and the racial inequality that resulted from it was primarily driven by federal policy that was unconstitutional, … it’s local programs and policies that maintain and reinforce and sustain it. One example I notice that New York City is grappling with now is our property assessment system. African Americans in every city in the country pay higher property taxes than whites do for homes of the same value. One reason for that is that most cities, New York included, do not do a physical reassessment of properties every year. They do one separated by long periods and then adjust them for inflation, assuming that all properties appreciate in value at the same rate. But that’s not what really happens: What happens is that properties in white neighborhoods appreciate more rapidly than properties in Black neighborhoods. The result is that the assessed value in white neighborhoods becomes farther below the real market value of those homes than the assessed value in Black neighborhoods. The result is that African Americans pay higher property taxes; they pay a bigger burden of the costs for schools and libraries and fire departments and all the other things that are supported by property taxes. They pay more than whites do for homes of similar value. This is a purely local issue. The reason it exists is because of federal policy that created that segregation. But the federal government has nothing to do with property assessments. This is just one example of the many, many local issues that have to be addressed and they will only be addressed if people mobilize to demand reform in the system. Property assessors in cities all over the country acknowledge that it’s a discriminatory system, there’s no mystery about it. But they’re not under any pressure to reform it and reforming it would save African Americans an enormous amount of money by lowering their property taxes.
AmNews: Do you really believe that there are that many people who want to create that change?
Rothstein: I do believe that. Twenty million people participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020. They weren’t all African Americans, in fact the majority of them were white. They were both suburban and urban. They were, as I say, white and Black and people of other ethnicities. They were low income and middle class. That indicates that there’s an enormous appetite to do something about racial inequality in this country. I know all the media keeps on focusing on the reaction against racial equality and that certainly exists, but we’re a deeply divided country and the number of people in cities all over this country who support racial equality is large enough to make a real difference if they only mobilize and know what to do. This book, “Just Action,” gives many, many examples, some small, some large, but all at a local level [of actions] that can make a real difference in redressing segregation.
AmNews: So how does gentrification play within your vision of changing housing segregation? Is it a boon or does it hurt communities?
Rothstein: We devoted a good bit of space in “Just Action” to gentrification and what local policies can do to mitigate its harms. For example, we could have inclusionary zoning programs that permitted the residents of communities that are gentrifying to remain because the new housing that’s being built in those communities includes units and homes that are affordable to the existing residents of that community. We talk a great deal about land trusts. …. A land trust is something usually run by a non-profit organization to which vacant land is donated. The land trust then builds homes both for sale and rental, but keeps ownership of the land underneath the homes. So, when the people who buy those homes buy them initially, it’s at much lower than market rates because they’re not paying for the cost of the land, the biggest thing that is driving high housing costs. And then when they resell those homes, they resell them at a price that does not include the cost of the land. So, another family who buys that home can afford it as well. Those are just two policies and there are many others … to combat gentrification, not to prevent it. We can’t prevent it: The market will always gentrify neighborhoods and urban areas, but it can prevent the massive displacement of existing residents so that communities become healthier and still have homes for the residents who have lived there for many years.
AmNews: Finally, you talk about the Supreme Court and pretty much fighting against some of its rulings. … taking a stand against some of the anti-race conscious remedies that the Supreme Court is now putting out.
Rothstein: Yes, we do discuss this. We have today a rogue Supreme Court that ignores the Constitution and simply implements its own racially bigoted preferences when it comes to policy. Conservatives, right wing Republicans have no hesitation in defying Supreme Court rulings. They don’t have any hesitation to do that. The only people who seem to bow down to unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings that preserve racial inequality are liberals.
In the 1960s in the Civil Rights Movement, people didn’t ask, well, is it legal to desegregate a restaurant? Should we not sit-in at a lunch counter because it’s illegal to do so? No, they challenged unconstitutional laws and unconstitutional rulings in order to make the civil rights advances that we made in the 1960s. We need the same kind of courage today on the part of activists who are trying to redress the racial inequality that was created unconstitutionally and that now is being preserved unconstitutionally by the Supreme Court. … In the case of racial inequality, we need to not allow them to destroy the democratic rules of this society. This constitution is written to have three equal parts of government, legislative, executive, judicial. What we’ve done—and there’s nothing in the constitution that authorizes this—is we’ve let the Supreme Court have the last word on everything. And that is not what the constitution provides. It’s something that has evolved by really the cowardice of public officials.
Now I’m not saying we violate every ruling of the Supreme Court, but when they make extremely unconstitutional rulings in the case of race, as Lincoln said they did in the Dred Scott decision, we need to not give it the respect that the Supreme Court thinks it’s entitled to.