Welcome to another episode of the Willoughby Hills podcast!
On today’s episode, I speak with author Richard Rothstein. In 2018, he published The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which demonstrated how federal, state, and local laws created and maintained segregated neighborhoods throughout the United States.
This history is often told in pieces and parts (“Levittown was racist”) but Richard helps show that segregation wasn’t the result of a handful of bigots or a few bad apples but was in fact written into the laws of our country.
Last year, Richard released a followup to The Color of Law, which he coauthored with his daughter Leah Rothstein. In Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law, Richard and Leah explore ways that people can get involved to right the wrongs of segregation in their own communities.
In this conversation, Richard and I discuss some of the historical background of how we became such a segregated country, how this racism affected everything from household wealth to health to school performance, and how to take action to repair the damage of this segregation.
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Related Episodes:
119. Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster on Ghosts of Segregation
113. Journalist Rebecca Clarren on the Parallel Histories of Jews and Lakota
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122. Author Richard Rothstein on America's Deliberate Segregation