About 50 years ago, the public and elected officials latched on to an assumption that persists to this day: segregation, in a post-Civil Rights America, is de facto—the result of private individuals’ decisions about where to live. And a 2007 Supreme Court ruling involving the integration of public schools expressly supported this idea. People, not the government, are responsible for segregation.

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is an attempt to dispel the myth of de facto segregation. The book rejects the view that African Americans and whites were divided by choice. By peeling back the layers of the nation’s pro-segregation past, Rothstein instead shows that at all levels—from the county sheriff’s office to the White House—there was a concerted effort to keep African Americans from integrating into white neighborhoods and to funnel them into slums and ghettos. The government did cause the problem, The Color of Law argues.

“Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequences of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.”

from “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein

With meticulous research, Rothstein chronicles housing segregation from post-Civil War to the present. The myth of de facto segregation begins to collapse under the weight of his extensive evidence. In example after example, the book shows how American cities were segregated by design. Zoning laws that created whites-only housing, and federal regulators allowing financial institutions to target minority communities in offering high-risk subprime mortgages in the early 2000s played a role.

Rothstein builds a compelling and nearly undeniable case that segregation in the United States is de jure—created not by societal influences, the actions of private institutions, or personal choices, but by discriminatory public policy and law.

This powerful and insightful book corrects decades of misinformation and offers a more accurate history of America’s racial divisions. Its goal is particularly timely, as the country continues to grapple with the divides that separate us, both literal and figurative. The Color of Law is not a roadmap forward, though. It offers few solutions. Instead, it is a necessary look backwards at the policies that led to the segregated America in which we now live.—Daniel Klote, Administrative Assistant and Membership Coordinator

Richard Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of The Color of Law, which was longlisted for the National Book Award.