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Indlæser... The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (udgave 2018)af Richard Rothstein (Forfatter)
Work InformationThe Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America af Richard Rothstein (Author)
Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. NF A good book, and a really important topic that doesn't get enough attention. Black people have been put into a severe disadvantage due to governmentally enforced segregation, and it has awful effects that need to be reversed if this country wants to pretend it gives anything resembling a fair shot to all races. In this book, Rothstein extensively details a pattern of state sponsored segregation, from the federal level, state level, county and cities. It is an important distinction, because legal cases for forced integration, or damages claimed from segregation, have been struck down on the grounds that the state has not taken part in it, which is obviously and demonstratively false. The book did get a little long winded at times, repeating case after case where the government had a hand. I understand the point of it, but it wasn't incredibly engaging at times. At the end of the book, Rothstein suggested ways of moving forward, and promoting integration. I was a bit disappointed by this section. I wish it were a little more fleshed out. I also wish it weren't so pessimistic. It felt like most of the suggestions were immediately struck down with "but this would never happen in today's political climate". If there's no chance of positive change happening, what's the entire point of this book? It felt a bit defeatist, and a bit of a bummer, and what should have been an optimistic way to end a long bummer of a book.
But since American schools don’t teach the true history of systemic racial segregation, Rothstein asks, “Is it any wonder [students] come to believe that African-Americans are only segregated because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves?” Only when Americans learn a common—and accurate—history of our nation’s racial divisions, he contends, will we then be able to consider steps to fulfill our legal and moral obligations. For the rest of us, still trying to work past 40 years of misinformation, there might not be a better place to start than Rothstein’s book. HæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation-that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation-the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments-that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.800973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Ethnic and national groups ; racism, multiculturalism General Biography And History North America United StatesLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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