Race and Place: What Will it Take to End Residential Segregation?
Dana Lake ‘23
Production Editor
On the evening of Thursday, February 25, the Law School joined with the School of Architecture to present this year’s Lillian K. Stone Distinguished Lecture in Environmental Policy. Hosted through Zoom, the lecture focused on the environmental and health impacts of America’s history of residential segregation.
This year’s lecturer was Richard Rothstein. Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) with the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. With an introduction from Dean Risa Goluboff and a question-and-answer session moderated by Professor Jonathon Cannon, the talk was both informative and confrontational.
From the outset, Rothstein does not pull his punches. Drawing from his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Rothstein used his lecture to lay out the deliberate, institutionally-administered segregationist policies American governments imposed on metropolitan areas through the 1900s. These policies took many forms, and were administered at all levels of government—from local municipalities to federal housing projects.
Richard Rothstein, courtesy of law.virginia.edu
As an aside, it was about twenty-minutes into the talk that I realized why some of this talk was familiar to me: Rothstein was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2017 when his book first published.[1] If you missed the lecture, I highly recommend looking up this interview. It is a credit to Rothstein’s passion for this subject that I was more than happy to continue listening, and the lecture incorporated his insights on how residential segregation has played a role in COVID-19 and the 2020 protests.
Residential segregation is a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health. For COVID-19, we see this manifest in testing disparities: When Texas reopened after its first shutdown, four out of six major cities had testing sites disproportionately located in neighborhoods whiter than the city’s median.[2] Food deserts are disproportionately located in minority neighborhoods—Hispanic people are a third as likely to have access to a chain supermarket as the average American; Black people are half as likely.[3]
Residential segregation directly contributes to wealth disparities between White and Black families. People of color were not only funneled into cities, they were prohibited from buying homes in suburbs—pushed into high cost-of-living areas where most families have to rent. Rothstein blames the racist policies of the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration, and private home loan companies for significantly contributing to the generational wealth gap. Black families were barred from purchasing affordable homes in suburban areas until the 1968 Fair Housing Act, at which point it was too late. White families that had been given exclusive access to these areas had built up equity in their homes and driven up prices; they were able to sell their homes for well above the national median income, and use that money as a foundation for their family’s future. These White families had the capital to send their children to college, to fund their retirements, and leave money behind after their death. It was a major boost that specifically left Black families behind.
Transitioning into the question-and-answer portion, Professor Cannon joined Rothstein on the screen. While it is always a joy to hear Professor Cannon speak on environmental policy, as director of the Law School’s Program in Law, Communities, and the Environment (PLACE) he was especially qualified to join in on the conversation. So what will it take to end residential segregation? Rothstein doesn’t hesitate. “You can’t undo racially specific discrimination without racially specific policies. We need affirmative action.”
What those policies should be specifically is harder to say. There is no way to fix the generational wealth gap caused by a century of unfair lending practices and the health impacts caused by redlining. One point Rothstein returns to again and again is that residential segregation is not de facto; it is not the result of individual preferences or income differences. In America, segregation is de jure; the result of law and policy decisions.
The hour-long lecture went quickly, and I was surprised when I heard Professor Cannon say there was time for a final question. Rothstein has an intense manner of speaking, and the lecture was an engaging experience. In wrapping up the question-and-answer, Rothstein concluded with a direct appeal: “I’m not speaking to you as lawyers or architects,” he insisted. “I’m speaking to you as citizens.”
Above and beyond what we do with our careers, it’s the choices we make in our own neighborhoods that can have the most direct impact in ending residential segregation.
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dl9uh@virginia.edu
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america
[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/27/862215848/across-texas-black-and-hispanic-neighborhoods-have-fewer-coronavirus-testing-sit
[3] https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=racial_justice_project