Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law Reviews

• 
  Barry

  Rothstein’s previous book,
  The Color of Law, is excellent. He convincingly shows how legal policies of housing discrimination created the urban ghettoes, inflicting long lasting effects on Black communities. It is a significant reason why the average wealth of Black families conspicuously and persistently lags that of white families. Here, with an assist from his daughter, he addresses the question of exactly how these wrongs can be righted.
  
  Obviously it’s easier to describe a problem than it is to provide workable remedies, and this is the main drawback to this book. There is a great deal of material comparing the various programs that have been tried in multiple locales which at times becomes tedious. It turns out that fixing these problems is a very tricky business. A lot of things can go wrong while trying to make things better. A recurring theme is that more housing is needed, but not only for the poor, but also for the lower middle class. And it’s best if the areas of housing contain a mixture of classes and races. Unfortunately, once this goal is attained constant vigilance is needed to maintain the proper balance. When simply left to unregulated market forces, wealthier people will move out of a neighborhood when too many poorer folks move in. The opposite problem also occurs—if investments are made to improve a lower income neighborhood, people with money move in, further improving the area but also driving up home prices and taxes thus making it more difficult for less wealthy people to move in or to stay (i.e. gentrification).
  
  Another problem is that bank appraisals are lower while property assessments are higher for houses in black neighborhoods compared with their values based on price. This means that it becomes more difficult to get a loan on favorable terms, making the home more difficult to afford, while at the same time charging the homeowners more than their fair share of property taxes.
  
  The authors suggest many many possible programs and policies that can be instituted to address these and other housing desegregation obstacles. They repeatedly bemoan the NIMBY mentality that often resists the types of policies that they promote because many homeowners rightly or wrongly believe that certain changes would impact their communities in negative ways. It’s interesting to consider that in order to achieve the desired ends, legislation or regulations may be required to override the will of the majority in certain communities. It’s not exactly democratic. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I wonder if much of the NIMBY mentality really is anti-poor rather than anti-black, but activists certainly find that it has more more punch to label their opponents as racist rather than merely elitist.
  
  This is just one guy’s opinion, but I think there might be a better chance of achieving the desired goals with different tactics and a different tone. First, stop pretending there won’t be costs—financial and otherwise. Be upfront about what those uncomfortable costs are going to be. Then, instead of saying that “all whites are the villains and therefore need to make restitution,” or the slightly better, “whites benefitted at the expense of blacks and therefore there should be some kind of restoration or reparations made,” the better tactical approach might be to point to all the problems that concentrated poverty and segregation have caused society as a whole (crime, drug use, racial conflict, failing schools, homelessness, etc) and explain that the way out of this morass is to promote desegregated communities and affordable housing. Desegregated by race, income level, and class. If we did this the future would be better for everyone. Therefore the work needs to be done—and paid for—by everyone. And this is going to mean that if you have been one of society’s winners you can count on feeling the pinch more. But these should be viewed as growing pains, not punishments. And they will be temporary. And all our kids and grandkids will benefit.
• 
  Rachael

  Thank you, NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company, for the ARC of Just Action, Pub Date: June 1, 2023, in exchange for my honest review.
  
  Just Action is the perfect follow-up to The Color of Law. In The Color of Law, Rothstein laid the groundbreaking investigative work that shed light on how government policies created segregation in America. Just Action takes the historical investigations to the next level by pairing them with grassroots, community-led, and inspired concrete strategies to challenge segregation.
  
  As a law student, I am particularly intrigued by the legal methods Rothstein (Richard and Leah) discuss in this practical guide. However, I genuinely think this book is suited for readers of all backgrounds, and it is undoubtedly written in accessible language.
  
  Just Action is written clearly and concisely. It is not just a theoretical guide but also provides concrete steps and strategies for concerned citizens and community leaders who want to make a positive difference in their backyard and beyond.
  
  Residential segregation is a complex issue that requires multifaceted solutions. The authors present a holistic approach in Just Action, making it a standout book for anyone who wants a more just society.
  
  I gave this book four instead of five stars because some ideas felt super repetitive from The Color of Law. If someone had not read Color of Law, they might find the information more interesting, but I reread it before booking up Just Action as a refreshing, and at times, it felt so similar that I was bored as a reader.
• 
  Tony

  A good condensing of critical issues that advocates and activists can focus on. Nothing new or mind-blowing.
• 
  Serge

  This book offers a courageous blueprint for inspiring a new civil rights movement that dares to defy. Such a movement would begin by addressing continued inequities in housing tht perpetuate de facto segregation in our major urban centers.
  Here are the excerpts that stood out
  Just Action
  p.42 Beginning in 1883, the Supreme Court asserted that the Constitution prohibits remedies for private discrimination against African Americans, effectively annihilating the clear intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Nearly a century went by while the Court blessed various impositions of second-class citizenship for descendants of the enslaved.
  In 1968, it changed its mind about its 1883 permission for private discrimination. The Court decreed that the 1866 Civil Rights Act prohibiting it had correctly implemented the Thirteenth Amendment’s intent to ban the “badges” of slavery.
  [In 1986] the Court conclude that while the Constitution permitted race-conscious hiring preferences, it also allowed Congress to effectively annihilate them by prohibiting the protection of those new employees from being laid off from lack of seniority, their historic exclusion notwithstanding.
  Nine years after that, in 1995, the Court went further: it found it impossible to conclude that African Americans generally have been disadvantaged in the United States, so determined that the Constitution permits a remedy only for individuals or groups who themselves suffered from specific acts of discrimination. The legacies of centuries of slavery and segregation were now deemed to have no relevance for contemporary inequality.
  p.44 In 1876, the Supreme Court said the federal government had no power under the Constitution to interfere with a Ku Klux Klan mob that massacred more than a hundred African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana; in 1966 (more than three thousand lynchings later), the Court revised its position, saying the federal government could prosecute Klan murders if a state government could prosecute Klan murders if a state government was looking the other way.
  
  p.45 In the 1857 Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that it had been unconstitutional for Congress to ban slavery in western territories that were not yet states and that African Americans , free or enslaved, could not be American citizens, even in states that prohibited slavery.
  p.48 Supporters of civil rights and civil liberties generally consider it too risky to renounce judicial supremacy. They fear that we may need a Supreme Court to prohibit enforcement of repressive laws if a hostile Congress and president control the government… This fear ignores the fact that the Supreme Court has almost always been on the side of repressing rights, not protecting them.
  There was only one brief period when the Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was more likely to protect African Americans’ rights and the civil liberties of all: the fifteen years from 1954 to 1969. Before and since then, with rare exceptions, the Court has consistently enforced racial discrimination and blocked efforts to overcome it
  p.58 …an organization of the formerly incarcerated to explain how criminal background checks make it difficult for those with arrest or conviction histories to find housing.
  p.63 When the economy collapsed in 2008, foreclosures took homes from a disproportionate share of African Americans because banks targeted them for fraudulently marketed loans.
  p.65 These days, about 40 percent of African American and 75 percent of white households own homes. The ownership gap narrowed a bit by 2000 but widened after the housing bubble burst in 2008 and is now greater than it was sixty years ago. You might think that if racial differences in homeownership was the most significant cause of the wealth gap, the white-black wealth ratio would be more like 2-to-1 (75-to-40), not 20-to-1. A good part of the explanation is that most African American owners have homes in neighborhoods where property values haven’t skyrocketed the way they have in white neighborhoods.
  p.65 African Americans who down tend to buy less expensive homes with more debt, buy their first homes later in life, and are less likely to sustain long-term homeownership than whites. These characteristics limit the wealth accumulation potential of owning a home.
  p.67 White home buyers are more than twice as likely as African Americans to get down payments from equity retrieved when they sell a previous home. With the black homeownership rate barey half that of the white one, this option is less available to African Americans, who are more likely to pull money from retirement accounts, putting their future security at greater risk.
  p.85 In the 1970s, federal courts ordered school districts to desegregate by busing white children to predominantly black schools and vice versa. In practice, politically powerful white parents sabotaged the two-way design; busing mostly dispatched black children to predominantly white schools. This set up fraught situations in which black children were subject to abuse and discrimination at their destinations.
  p.96 Some African Americans reject the goal of stable racial diversity tat cn result from gentrification. They hope to improve neighborhood quality while simultaneously maintaining an area’s African American cultural and racial homogeneity. This aspiration is reinforced by public officials and housing and urban development experts who convince themselves that more investment in low-income black neighborhoods can transform them into places with equal opportunity while preserving their racially exclusive character. But this is a contradiction: it is impossible, however attractive the idea may seem. “Separate but equal” doesn’t work any better for neighborhoods than it did for restaurants, buses, or schools.
  p.100 [policies that can prevent displacement from gentrification] These policies include inclusionary (mixed-income) zoning, rent control, prohibition of evictions except for just cause, prevention of security deposit theft, limits on condominium conversions, support for community land trusts, regulation of phony home sales, and property tax freezes.
  p.103 From 2001 to 2019, renters’ median incomes rose only 3 percent while their rents rose 15 percent. After the pandemic, rents rose even more and became one of the biggest causes of runaway inflation in 2022.
  p.114 African Americans are arrested at a rate more than double their population share. By age twenty-three, half of black men have arrest records. One in three will eventually serve prison time, compared to one in seventeen white men. African Americans make up more than a third of those in jail, in prison, on probation, or on parole, close to three times their share of the population.
  p.115 Men and women recently released from jail or prison, especially African Americans, may often begin by being homeless. They are then at higher risk of being arrested, jailed, and convicted, as may cities now enforce “quality of life” offenses, like sleeping in public spaces. Homelessness and unemployment can lead to more crimes of necessity, such as theft, keeping the revolving door of incarceration turning.
  p.116 The stigma of incarceration is difficult to erase. Court documents may help, and advocates can push for their adoption, but their impact will likely be limited. Trusted community organizations should also vouch for prospective tenants and present letters from friends, family, religious leaders, and employers. The best way to improve housing access for the formerly convicted is to address the stigma of criminal records directly, by educating landlords and passing and then enforcing ban-the-box ordinances for public and private housing.
  p.126 [Contract Buyers League in Chicago] The Contract Buyers League filed two federal lawsuits against the sellers, alleging civil rights violations, conspiracy, and fraud. The league lost both. In one case the judge permitted evidence that there was no discrimination against blacks on account of race because speculators also preyed on a few mixed-race couples and Hispanics,. The foreman of the all-white jury boasted that he’d voted to end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
  During the 1950s and ‘60s, some 85 percent of all black-owned homes in Chicago were bought on contract. Most contract sale victims never received even partial justice.
  p.128 In other cities besides Chicago, such as Baltimore, Detroit, and Cincinnati, real estate agents took advantage of black home buyers by purporting to sell homes to them while in actuality they were not. African Americans thought they had purchased homes but the contracts they were offered provided none of the security and equity of a conventional, FHA, or VA loan. With a mortgage, if an owner falls behind in payments, lenders can foreclose, but the family first has a chance to bring payments up to date. If an owner sells, he or she can retrieve cash from a prior down payment and the principal portion of monthly charges paid. The owner also gains from a property’s value appreciation.
  Realtors who perpetuated the contract sale fraud sometimes initiated it by blockbusting, terrifying white residents that their property values would plummet because black families were about to move nearby. It was untrue: property values were likely to climb when African Americans became neighbors, because they were almost always willing to pay more than whites; they fced such a small selection of homes on offer. Nonetheless, terrified owners sold out to blockbusting realtors at prices far below their true values.
  …realtors then charged prices far above market value to African Americans desperate for housing. Interest rates on contract sales were exorbitant, much higher than what whites with mortgages had to pay. Speculators sometimes entrapped black buyers by pretending to represent them in negotiations without disclosing that they themselves were the owners. Contract sellers formed syndicates of white professionals—lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians—to finance the speculators’ operations by purchasing portions of their portfolios of contracts. These investors reaped large profits that made their way into white middle-class inheritances, which now contribute to the white wealth advantage.
  p.129 Real estate salesmen misrepresented properties’ deteriorated condition and colluded with building inspectors, who then required expensive repairs that victimized families could not afford; it became an excuse for eviction, after which operators could perpetuate an identical fraud upon another black family in need of housing.
  Agents who participated in these schemes purchased properties with mortgages from the same banks that refused to finance African Americans for the same houses or, indeed, for homes anywhere. The real estate agencies, brokers, banks, and syndicate partners that colluded in this system of exploitation, have in many cases, identifiable institutional successors today.
  p.133 Contract selling in black neighborhoods diminished after 1968, when passage of the Fair Housing Act caused the Federal Housing Administration to consider African Americans and neighborhoods in which they lived eligible for its mortgage insurance.
  p.156 Before the state of Michigan ordered Detroit to conduct a property reassessment in 2017, it had overvalued houses in black neighborhoods for decades. Home prices had fallen with the decline of the auto industry; still assessed amounts upon which the city calculated property taxes often increased. When owners could not pay these discriminatorily inflated taxes the county foreclosed and resold their homes to investors to recoup the unpaid taxes. Between 2011 and 2015, Wayne County foreclosed on 100,000 Detroit homes, one in four in the city, for overdue taxes. Ten percent of the foreclosures were due to improperly inflated tax assessments. Most victims were black.
  p.214 African American home buyers don’t just face racial discrimination in appraisals, property listings, credit scores, and mortgages. After overcoming these hurdles, they need to take out homeowner’s insurance.
  p.233 School segregation makes neighborhood integration difficult, if not impossible, and neighborhood segregation makes school segregation inevitable.
  p.239 Some white suburbs have excess school capacity as birthrates fall and populations age. A voluntary busing program can offer those seats to urban African American families who seek integrated educations for their families.
  Suburban and urban school districts can also allow students to voluntarily cross their boundaries. The receiving schools should invest in making their campuses welcoming environments to children from other districts by offering mentoring to those students and professional development to teachers and staff. Transportation authorities ca offer free trips to students traveling to more distant schools.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Ana W

  I'm so glad that Richard Rothstein & Leah Rothstein wrote this book! It's a follow up to Mr. Rothstein's book, The Color Of Law, which I highly recommend. I have learned so much reading both of these books. Just Action stands on it's own; you don't need to read The Color Of Law first. The Color Of Law focused on the US Government's sanction and enforcement of racism in housing policy. Just action, blends information about past (and current) racist policies with insight into what can be done to lesson the effects and harm done by these policies. This book is a must read for anyone interested in racial justice in the USA. I hope it will be widely read. Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy in return for my honest opinion.
• 
  Susan

  As a follow-up to The Color of Law, this book provides suggestions for how local groups can impact the segregation that has become built into our housing system. While provided in a more narrated form, I almost felt like it should have included bullet points and maybe checklists to separate the action items from the information or stories provided around the suggestions. I would suggest that anyone wanting to read this book read The Color of Law first to provide a solid foundation; however, there is a lot of repetition between the two books. Additionally, the book focused on groups, which may not be something everyone is comfortable with or able to be involved in. I would have liked to have seen suggestions for how individuals could contribute. Covid showed us how postcards could help influence the vote. Are there similar things that can be done in regards to housing? I fear not enough people will read this book or be motivated enough to join local action groups. We are great at quick bursts of enthusiasm. This problem needs strong, continued focus at both the local and national level.
  
  Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for a copy of the book. This review is my own opinion.
• 
  T.A. Bound

  This excellent and timely book belongs on everyone's reading list. Not only does it outline many of the systemic efforts by corporations and government to discriminate against and impoverish African-Americans through our sordid history, but it suggests ways to end, combat and remedy the lingering effects of generations of segregation and discrimination. No one can be expected to follow all of their suggestions, but you can find one that appeals to you or meets your gifts.
  Perhaps most importantly, it covers some of the most subtle and insidious efforts to segregate our population by race and names names, allowing the reader to not only counter the current fad at denying the very existence of these efforts, but to target those who bear some of the responsibility to rectify their former actions so people can request these corporations and governments to make amends for their past unconscionable actions.
• 
  AnnieM

  This is the book I was waiting for! I had read the “Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein and learned so much about the de facto and de juris discrimination that has happened and is still happening in many communities. This book follows up on the research of that book and is written by Richard and his daughter Leah. This book lays the foundation of what the challenges are and shares solutions created and implemented by communities. There are so many inspiring actions outlined here, this book gave me hope! Some of the ideas came from groups in Chicago and since I live here I feel that I can take the next step in addressing the inequities in my community. I recommend this book.
  
  Thank you to Netgalley and W.W. Norton & Company for an ARC and I left this honest review voluntarily.
• 
  Travis

  This book is a great guidebook for activists. If you want a more equal and diverse neighborhood, this book has plenty of ideas for making it happen.
  
  The challenges created by segregation are deeply-rooted. The authors point out (rightly so) that, “[a]s a society, we are always more sensitive to unfairness experienced by whites when it is designed to remedy unfairness experienced by blacks.” But redressing segregation starts with talking to our neighbors and getting to know their needs. Learning helps too, that’s what “The Color of Law” is for. But start by talking to your neighbors.
  
  I was excited to see my town, Cleveland Heights, get a mention!
• 
  Ashley

  This book is a follow up to Rothstein’s The Color of Law, a fascinating and detailed look at how the government contributed to segregation within our cities.
  
  Just Action felt like a mix of education and call to action. There were so many things that I did not know, especially when it comes to renting and tenancy, that I already feel the need to go back and read parts of the book again.
  
  I appreciated the chapters in the book that called out specific ways to support your local communities.
• 
  Jacy

  A quick follow-up book to The Color of Law, with a lot of actionable steps for all levels of government, companies, and civilians to make to create a more equitable society and begin the reparations for those the government, companies and communities have wronged so egregiously.
• 
  Morgan

  Just Action is part history, part call to action about what people can do in their own neighborhood to fight residential segregation. One thing I really like about this book is that Just Action can be read on it's own without needing to read "The Color of Law". Overall, Just Action is very easy to read/understand for anyone who is newer to this topic.
• 
  Dakoda Barton

  informative and thought provoking.