Book Review: The Color of Law

Housing policy three generations after the Civil Rights movement

Note: The following was initially written as part of my “Equity and Bias in Education” law school course. Publishing by popular demand. The course as a whole was frustrating and informative in equal measure—if you’re interested in a more substantive recounting of the full course, please let me know.

I. Introduction

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is best understood as two books: the book it wants to be, and the book it is. The book wants to be a rousing call to action: a reminder of just how deeply de jure segregation is entrenched into our society and a push for drastic government action to overcome that. It fails at that endeavor. The book’s actual structure is interesting and worthwhile, but not quite so lofty: it provides an overview of early- to mid-1900s segregation, focusing particularly on aspects that could be attributed to government rather than to the public.

Why does the book fail at its goal?

In explaining his approach, Rothstein is admirably honest: he frames the issue as a constitutional one because his preferred policy prescriptions would lead to an increase of crime and disorder in the neighborhoods he wants to change.¹ While he is confident his approach would carry long-term benefits, he acknowledges it is not always win-win.²

While that candor is admirable, it is ultimately damning as well: not because it is never acceptable to imagine policies that carry costs, nor even because it is unacceptable to propose that some people should disproportionately bear those costs, but because Rothstein spends three hundred pages diligently ignoring the reality of how the color of law has changed for the past three generations and the lessons we can take from the successes and failures of those changes.

Rothstein spends chapter after chapter drilling down into the specifics of policies in San Francisco, in Detroit, in New York, from Wilson to FDR to Eisenhower, telling important and compelling stories about the difficulties black people faced in their fight for integration. And then—he stops. He makes a few cursory attempts to gesture towards racially discriminatory policies past the early 1960s, but on examination, these policies—most notably the “reverse redlining” of subprime loans he mentions in connection to the 2008 financial crisis³—came about in part due to explicit attempts to enable integration and support racial minorities. He tells the stories of horrible racial violence from white residents in segregated neighborhoods as courageous black people moved into those neighborhoods; he elides the violence and disorder other well-meaning residents faced as they grappled with their changing neighborhoods. Finally, he reduces ethnic conflict in US history to a simple white-versus-black morality play rather than situating it in the fuller picture of ethnic and religious tensions in the twentieth century American landscape, flattening and obscuring a thornier and more complex history.

The Color of Law is, in short, half of a serious, important book. Without the other half, though, I fear following Rothstein’s prescriptions would lead us not to overcome the past, but simply to repeat it.

II. Rothstein’s telling: The Color of Pre–Civil Rights Era Law

Rothstein’s case should be understood as a strategic one. While he admits sympathy to the idea that de jure segregation (segregation by law) and de facto segregation (segregration by choice) are not wholly separable, he chooses to address his perceived opponents on their own terms.⁴ In response to arguments from Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts rejecting race-conscious school desegregation plans on the basis that it is inappropriate to take government action to fix de facto segregation, Rothstein writes his book with every page directed towards arguing that the segregation our cities face is a result of law and must therefore be addressed by law.⁵ Per Rothstein, “African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.”⁶ In Rothstein’s telling, strong government action towards desegregation is a moral and constitutional obligation. As such, the book is in many ways best read as an instruction manual for sympathetic lawyers and judges: use these arguments, defeat your opponents on their own turf, and entrench Rothstein’s interpretations into law.

Rothstein marshals a vast array of evidence in support of those claims, centered mostly around the early twentieth century, before the Civil Rights era.

His emphasis on “redlining” deserves particular focus. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government-sponsored New Deal program, mapped out the country’s cities: green for safe neighborhoods, red for risky neighborhoods, yellow and blue in between.⁷ Per Rothstein, “a neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.”⁸ While the HOLC sometimes helped homeowners in “redlined” neighborhoods, Rothstein notes, “the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks.”⁹

Black Americans faced similar challenges with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another program established by Roosevelt. Rothstein documents how the FHA provided a manual instructing real estate agents to maintain “stability” by keeping properties occupied by “the same social and racial classes,” and warned people away from schools with pupils of a “far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element.”¹⁰ In one New Jersey suburb in 1941, the FHA flatly refused to issue loans to creditworthy middle-class black Americans, stating that “no loans will be given to colored developments.”¹¹

Step by step, Rothstein argues, the government encouraged segregation even as it was banning some forms of discrimination: zoning aimed at discouraging integration, propaganda aimed at persuading people to move to single-family dwellings, redlined maps, mortgage insurance for all-white neighborhoods, and bank loans to builders making “the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities.”¹²

One particularly salient example of this suburbanization was Levittown, a set of large post-war suburban housing developments for returning veterans. Rothstein tells the story of Vince Mereday, a black veteran who tried to purchase a house in a Levittown in 1945, only to be rebuffed and left with no choice but to buy a house in a primarily black neighboring suburb.¹³ In another Levittown in 1957, black veteran Bill Myers and his wife bought a home only to be met with slurs, hundreds of demonstrators assembling in front of their house and pelting it with rocks, people flying Confederate flags and blaring music all night—and law enforcement standing by or even standing with the mob.¹⁴

Rothstein’s accounts of the phenomenon known as blockbusting struck me most. In the mid–twentieth century, speculators would sell properties to black families, persuade white families that the neighborhoods were on the verge of turning into slums, then buy the white families’ homes at bargain prices.¹⁵ Sometimes this went to absurd lengths, with one agent claiming to have arranged burglaries to convince white families their neighborhoods were unsafe.¹⁶

Similarly striking were Rothstein’s accounts of the conflicts around public housing. He tells of repeated battles over whether to integrate public housing or keep it segregated. When one New Deal–era Detroit project was built, Rothstein notes, white residents rioted, leading to a hundred arrests and thirty-eight hospitalizations (almost all black people).¹⁷

Often, the segregation Rothstein notes was privately agreed upon but enforced by law, as when neighborhoods first signed contracts allowing neighbors to sue if black people purchased properties, then created homeowners associations for the same purpose.¹⁸ At times, people found creative workarounds to these racial covenants, such as when George Brown (later a congressman) looked for a property for his cooperative housing association but failed to find any that refused to exclude black people. In the end, the association purchased a property with a covenant that made an exception for “live-in domestic servants,” then obtained a legal opinion that all members counted as domestic servants because they were required to spend five hours a week cleaning, cooking, and shopping.¹⁹

After laying out this case and supporting it with more examples and stories, Rothstein outlines both why it should be treated as relevant today and what people could consider doing about it. Housing segregation, he emphasizes, is complicated to undo.²⁰ Moving from an urban apartment to a suburban home is difficult.²¹ Home values have appreciated over the years, and given how long we waited to undo things and how facially race-neutral policies reinforced existing dynamics, he claims, conditions set in motion in the mid–twentieth century have calcified.²² Rothstein notes a wealth gap between white and black Americans, with a median white household wealth of about $134,000 and a median black household wealth of about $11,000, and points out that young black Americans are ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young white Americans.²³

What should we do about all of this? Rothstein provides some suggestions while making it clear that much more should be done. First, he points out, textbooks should emphasize the de jure nature of segregation rather than treating it as simply de facto and eliding many details (the approach many current textbooks take).²⁴ Returning to Levittown, he proposes an example remedy: the government purchasing homes at market rates, then reselling them to black Americans at the prices their grandparents would have paid had they been permitted to move in.²⁵ He also proposes banning single-family zoning or punishing suburbs that lack low- and moderate-income housing via the tax code,²⁶ outlawing refusal to lease to families using government-subsidized section 8 vouchers,²⁷ and taking aggressive action to desegregate schools.²⁸

Rothstein is prone to inflating his case, reading all ambiguities in favor of his frame. He uses imprecision strategically at times to make his claims sound more definite than they are, as when he speaks of “zoning ordinances that […] may well have had a racial intent”²⁹ in a New Jersey suburb, “absenteeism that was partly attributable to transportation obstacles”³⁰ when describing why workers were fired, or highlighting that “some” discharges were “for protesting segregation in army towns” when noting that black veterans disproportionately received dishonorable discharges.³¹ Without examining primary sources, it’s difficult to know whether “some” means a small handful of dishonorable discharges or an appreciable chunk, or how much absenteeism stemmed from transportation obstacles. Perhaps most disconcerting for me is the point at which Rothstein claims that section 8 vouchers are not entitlements because funding is insufficient for every eligible family to receive a voucher, while tax deductions for homeowners are entitlements.³² If the government giving you free benefits is not an entitlement but the government taking less of your money in taxes is, the word “entitlement” has lost all meaning. His case would be stronger without this sort of rhetorical game.

The most useful external criticism I found came in Moving Toward Integration, a scholarly overview of the history of fair housing. Authors Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff criticize Rothstein’s model of segregation as government-led as “rel[ying] heavily on highly selective anecdotes and broad assertions.”³³ They point out that there was no federal intervention in local housing markets before the 1930s, by which point segregation was “firmly established throughout urban America,” and argue that federal administrators should be viewed as followers rather than leaders in housing segregation.³⁴

More pointedly, Sander, Kucheva, and Zasloff attack Rothstein’s interpretation of the HOLC maps, noting that he “claims (without evidence) that race was the main determinant of district classification, and claims (falsely) that affluent areas were classified as red if they had any African-American presence.”³⁵ Pointing to a federal reserve working paper, they argue that many factors other than race were used for classification, and in some cases a black presence “made neighborhoods more likely to be upgraded from blue to green and from yellow to blue” in addition to making them “more likely to be downgraded from yellow to red.”³⁶ In their own lending policies, the authors point out, HOLC made “thousands of mortgages in red areas,” and many black Americans in “heavily black communities” secured “conventional financing in the 1920s and 1930s.”³⁷ While I have not had the opportunity to compare each book’s claims in granular detail, Moving Toward Integration left me unsure how much of Rothstein’s government focus was the cleanest interpretation of the facts and how much was overfitting to a single cause.

Why is Rothstein so committed to focusing on de jure segregation and arguing for a constitutional remedy? Why not argue in simple moral terms, focusing on the social benefits of integration? He waits until the FAQ at the end of his book to fully address this. It is essential to frame it in constitutional terms, he emphasizes, because there will be costs. He repeats this several times, in several ways: “integration cannot wait until every African American youth becomes a model citizen.”³⁸ “We have no right to wait until every low-income and poorly educated mother develops perfect parenting skills before we move to desegregate metropolitan areas.”³⁹ “Costs will… be involved, and we should accept that those costs are part of our constitutional obligation.”⁴⁰ Some, he emphasizes, will suffer unfairness due to his desegregation plans, but that is a price all of us should be willing to pay.⁴¹

What are those costs? Rothstein encourages the government to require Section 8 and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit programs to “facilitate movement of low-income African American families into middle-class communities.”⁴² He anticipates a crime surge in those neighborhoods due to these plans.⁴³ He advocates for the integration of more low-income students into upper-middle-class schools, which he expects means “we will have to divert resources to special counseling and remedial programs, and taxes will have to rise to pay for them or elective programs may have to be cut.”⁴⁴

Setting aside Rothstein’s policy prescriptions, the book presents a forceful case for the role of government in maintaining a system of segregation through the early twentieth century and a reasonable case for its lingering effects. It’s hard not to see echoes of Levittown in the heavily black inner cities and heavily white suburbs in so many American cities today.

III. The other side: The Color of Great Society Law

Rothstein speaks of many of his plans as if they have never been tried, or never been tried seriously—as if all that it would take to accomplish them is to try them seriously. Nowhere is this more frustrating than when he speaks of school integration initiatives. While Rothstein focuses on the court cases his opponents won, he elides mention of many cases his allies won. Most notable among them is the Kansas City school desegregation experiment, an ambitious program in which a district court judge in Missouri, Judge Russell Clark, mandated that the state triple the budget of its struggling Kansas City school district over a decade, with an eye towards bringing white children in from the suburbs and reducing segregation.⁴⁵

From 1985-1997, the Kansas City school district received more funding than any district in the country.⁴⁶ It increased its teacher salaries and decreased its student-teacher ratio to 12 or 13 to 1, lower than any other major school district in the country.⁴⁷ It built new schools, renovated others, added amenities and administrators and extracurricular activities, and constructed an elaborate busing plan.⁴⁸ To pay for these increases, the state had to decrease budgets in other districts around the state, leading to multimillion-dollar shortfalls in other districts.⁴⁹ The judge mandated a doubling of property tax in the school district and a 1.5 percent income surcharge on people working in Kansas City but living elsewhere.⁵⁰

What was the outcome of this program? Failure, by every metric. The district hoped to attract 5,000 to 10,000 white suburban students, but enrolled no more than 1,500 in any given year, most of whom returned to their old schools after a year.⁵¹ Every year, the percent of nonwhite students in the district’s schools increased.⁵² Initial promises in court that the district’s test scores would “climb above state averages in less than five years” melted away as no measurable outcomes meaningfully changed—not overall achievement levels, and not the black-white test score gap.⁵³ Twelve years and three Supreme Court rulings after it began, Judge Clark ended the funding program in abject failure.⁵⁴

Why focus on this story? Rothstein’s core argument is written to courts. I am not a judge, and the current Supreme Court is unlikely to look favorably on Rothstein’s ideas, but it is the sort of argument Judge Clark found persuasive and many progressive judges will likewise find agreeable. I am a cynic about constitutional arguments. Rothstein makes his instrumentally; the conservatives on the court often do the same, with justifications seemingly flowing backwards from goals. I do not expect to sway people’s sentiment on Rothstein’s constitutional arguments one way or another.

But the substance of his book is about the real-world harms of overbearing policies. He tells the stories of people harmed by government-aided segregation, of the brave individuals who fought to integrate neighborhoods and schools in hostile areas. These are important stories. They deserve to be told, and they are rightly resonant. I am terrified, though, of every new well-meaning Judge Clark, confident that desegregation is simply a matter of judicial will and that we all have a duty to absorb the real-world costs of unwieldy and overbearing plans, who will burn more decades and more billions of dollars and play games with more lives chasing after false promises.

I linger on the Kansas City story because I learned Rothstein’s stories and others fitting much the same frame in school, but not stories like the Kansas City desegregation experiment. Those stories fall away into quiet, dark corners, unsuited as they are to uplifting grand narratives. I linger on the Kansas City story not because I believe every desegregation policy has ended in failure, but because I have no idea how to figure out how many ended in failure short of digging through countless primary sources myself. I linger on it because, put simply, I have no idea how many top-down interventions end up like Kansas City and how many end up like the steps to a better world Rothstein envisions. Who can I honestly trust to present a full, evenhanded picture? What can I do, short of personally running through every desegregation-focused policy of the past 60 years? I find a void in place of answers there, with visions of Kansas City looming to fill it.

It does not help that on the rare occasions Rothstein tells stories beyond the year 1965, he elides critical parts that reshape the takeaways and lead me to doubt broader parts of his frame. Take, for instance, his coverage of “reverse redlining”—which he defines as “excessive marketing of exploitative loans in African American communities” and points at as an important cause of the 2008 financial crisis.⁵⁵

Rothstein notes that black Americans were two to three times as likely as white Americans to have subprime loans—high interest-rate loans offered to borrowers deemed high-risk—in the lead-up to the financial crisis and identifies exploitation by banks targeting those communities.⁵⁶ Exploitative loans existed, and minority homeowners were indeed disproportionately impacted by them. But why?

The most compelling answer I’ve seen comes mostly from journalist Alyssa Katz, author of Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us⁵⁷, but it starts with a quote from President George W. Bush:

The rate of homeownership in America now stands a record high of 68.4 percent. Yet there is room for improvement. The rate of homeownership amongst minorities is below 50 percent. And that's not right, and this country needs to do something about it. […] We need to close the minority homeownership gap in America so more citizens have the satisfaction and mobility that comes from owning your own home, from owning a piece of the future of America. Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we're making progress toward that goal.⁵⁸

Katz’s book is a serious, layered look at policy that lets nobody off the hook—not lenders, not the government, and not the liberal activists she’s sympathetic to. Her story begins right where Rothstein’s book mostly leaves off. She tells the story of how in 1967-68, the FHA—hoping to reverse its decades-prior discrimination Rothstein meticulously documents—abruptly reversed its policy, electing to insure mortgages everywhere. In her telling: “Real estate agents and loan brokers descended on inner cities, trying to find borrowers who would be unlikely to pay their mortgages back, because the real-estate speculator would get paid in full by the federal government. …There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of abandoned houses all over the country as a result of the FHA debacle, and it got a lot of attention at the time and was almost forgotten to history after that.”⁵⁹

The subprime lending crisis grew for decades after that in the Reagan administration, the Clinton administration, and finally the Bush administration.⁶⁰ Government programs handled standard, safe loans, so after a tax law change in 1986, private programs jumped to fill the margins in. Clinton and Bush aggressively pushed homeownership—and particularly closing the homeownership gap.⁶¹ Community organizers and activists pushed to make housing more available. Homeowners jumped at opportunities to move to bigger, better houses with loans they could not have previously gotten.⁶² Fundamentally, increasing access to loans and homeownership was framed as a social justice issue with bipartisan support. Government policy encouraged it, thinking it would help low-income and minority Americans own their own homes. The term “reverse redlining” is, indeed, more apt than Rothstein credits: the subprime mortgage crisis came about as the sequel to a disastrous FHA policy aimed very literally at reversing redlining, and every step of government mortgage policy between 1968 and the crash in 2008 centered around the goal of helping minorities, poorer Americans, and particularly black Americans.

There are other stories to tell in this vein, enough to fill many books: stories of well-intentioned government policy, of complex racial and ethnic conflict, of thorny reality.⁶³ This is the silent second half of Rothstein’s book, the sixty years he addresses with a cursory, incurious eye: What happened when people took his edicts seriously? What have massive, ambitious government programs aimed at closing gaps accomplished? When people have placed trust in judges influenced by arguments like Rothstein’s, collectively making sacrifices towards noble goals, how often has it worked and how often has it made things worse?

The color of law flipped when my grandparents were young. Not perfectly—not such that every court case and every policy decision was as Rothstein would hope—but thoroughly enough that the downstream ill effects of well-intentioned policy must be examined by any book claiming to tell the story of the color of law and aiming to argue for radical changes. If people do not understand stories like the Kansas City school funding disaster and the fuller meaning of “reverse redlining,” they are likely to repeat the same errors and cause the same damage once more.

Is every well-intentioned policy doomed to failure? Are our cities doomed to remain forever as they became in the post-war period, with visions of integration a distant dream? I certainly hope not. We can learn from the past, see what works, what doesn’t, and why, and move forward. To do so takes more than wielding the Constitution as a bludgeon to enact unpopular and harmful policy, though: it takes careful observation, serious analysis, and persuasion in pursuit of policies that really do promise to make all of us better off. Bitter reality, to be overcome, must be understood.

IV. Conclusion

At root, I admire Rothstein’s conviction that comfortable narratives of history are to be re-examined, that hard truths of the past must be grappled with, and that a full picture must be seen. I worry, though, that he flinches away from too many of the hard stories of the past three generations, retreating instead into an all-too-comfortable narrative of his own. The Color of Law deepens and adds color to the narrative of US history I heard growing up and I see in history museums, in schools, and in other institutions, but it fundamentally works to support that same frame of history as a fight between visionary reformers and bigoted reactionaries, with Rothstein stepping once more into the role of visionary reformer.

Every schoolchild hears Martin Luther King’s stirring call for racial justice and a society that tears down the barriers black people have faced throughout US history. I heard and sympathized with it when I was young, I hear and sympathize with it now. Every schoolchild who hears his I Have a Dream speech, even three generations after its publication, cannot help but cheer his vision, but when adults hear the same speech, the question inevitably arises: why is it so hard? Why, sixty years after the Great Society, do we have so much left to do?

It is tempting to place all the blame for that on malicious, ignorant, or self-interested people determined to preserve their place in society at all costs. We’ve had sixty years of court cases to examine, though, sixty years of policy reforms, sixty years of politicians and activists and citizens agitating for change, voting for change, and litigating for change. In those sixty years, there have been plenty of villains standing athwart reforms yelling “Stop”—but there have also been plenty of bright-eyed reformers who pushed useless or even destructive changes at great cost, then moved on to their next bright-eyed reform leaving others to pay the cost. A frank, serious re-examination of history must look clear-eyed at both.

Rothstein makes a serious demand in his book, asking people to trust his vision of self-described social engineering enough that they become willing to welcome crime, disorder, and tension into their communities in order to heal the wounds of the past. He has the courage to present this demand directly and without prevarication. I cannot trust his demand, though, because in calling for a full look at history he elides every failure of reformers before him, dodges every opportunity to examine where one program or another went wrong and why people could honestly expect his own reforms to be different.

If The Color of Law had been written in 1960, I would call it a courageous, visionary, and monumentally consequential book, an uncompromising look at a legacy of unjust cultural and political discrimination that must be confronted. Today, sixty years after Brown, I admire Rothstein’s dedication to ensuring that history does not go forgotten but cannot help but feel the book is a missed opportunity at best and damaging at worst. In the end, Rothstein avoids all but the most cursory examination of where and why sixty years of law and policy aimed overtly at closing the gaps he emphasizes has failed to do so.

If we are to move forward productively, we must learn to examine the full tapestry of our history, not simply the convenient parts. Rothstein documents important stories from three and four generations ago but misses or misrepresents critical parts of more recent history that complicate the simple, advocacy-focused narrative he aims to present. The color of law is not what it was in 1960. When will our analysis, in turn, move beyond that decade’s frame?

1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law, (Liveright Publishing, 2017), 225-226

2. Id.

3. Id. at 109

4. Id. at xiv.

5. Id.

6. Id.

7. Id. at 64.

8. Id.

9. Id.

10. Id. at 65-66.

11. Id. at 66.

12. Id. at 75.

13. Id. at 69.

14. Id. at 140-142.

15. Id. at 95.

16. Id. at 96.

17. Id. at 26-27.

18. Id. at 79.

19. Id. at 81.

20. Id. at 179.

21. Id.

22. Id.

23. Id. at 186.

24. Id. at 199-201.

25. Id. at 202.

26. Id. at 204.

27. Id. at 208.

28. Id. at 211.

29. Id. at 174-175.

30. Id. at 175.

31. Id. at 167.

32. Id. at 209.

33. Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva, Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing, Harvard University Press (2018), 83

34. Id. at 84.

35. Id. at 508.

36. Id. at 97.

37. Id.

38. Rothstein, The Color of Law at 226.

39. Id. at 232-233.

40. Id. at 227.

41. Id. at 236. Cynically, I am reminded of a line from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

42. Id. at 225.

43. Id. at 225-226.

44. Id. at 226.

45. Paul Ciotti, Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment (March 16, 1998), pp. 2-3, 5.

46. Id. at 2.

47. Id.

48. Id. at 10.

49. Id.

50. Id. at 11.

51. Id. at 15-16.

52. Id. at 18.

53. Id. at 19-20.

54. Id. at 22.

55. Rothstein, The Color of Law, at 109.

56. Id. at 110-111.

57. h/t Steve Sailer via Marginal Revolution

58. George W. Bush, President Bush Signs American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, December 16, 2003

59. Mark Schone, Who’s to blame for the housing crash?, Salon, June 30, 2009.

60. Id.

61. Id.

62. Id.

63. As part of my background reading for this review, I read through three right-wing favorites: Harold Saltzman’s Race War in High School, documenting racial conflict in an overcrowded, underfunded New York school; Scott Cummings’s Left Behind in Rosedale, telling the story of older white residents who stayed in Fort Worth’s Polytechnic Heights neighborhood through white flight; and portions of E. Michael Jones’s The Slaughter of Cities, which focuses on the thesis that well-connected WASPs used integration as one of several cudgels to break up ethnic enclaves such as clusters of Polish Catholics. The first two focus on a somewhat scattershot burst of anecdotes focused on the thorny parts of desegregation, the third is a wildly ambitious and sprawling overview of 20th century ethnic conflict from a reactionary Catholic perspective.

Jones was surprisingly useful for confirming progressive readings of history, always with slightly different angles: focusing on the ways European immigrants began to identify as white instead of eg Polish and examining blockbusting and public housing projects as tools to break up ethnic enclaves. Reader beware, and the book is a bit of a slog at times, but reading it does give me the opportunity to say things like “Rothstein echoes the sentiment of Catholic reactionary writer E. Michael Jones that the FDR administration segregated cities as a form of social engineering,” which if nothing else is a decent bit.

No material from the books wound up making it into my review—Kansas City and “reverse redlining” gave me plenty of material for the critique section—but I would be fascinated to read a proper synthesis of left-wing and right-wing accounts of race relations in the mid–20th century, and I think it would be a worthy project for someone serious to pursue. In the meantime, here are a couple of excerpts that give an idea of the tone and perspective Jones takes.