Government policies at root of unfair, segregated cities

Look at one of those census maps of San Jose based on race: The east/west divide is notable, and our shameful residential segregation owes a lot to government zoning and development policies whose impact still lingers. Noted author Richard Rothstein reports in Reason magazine.

"The black-white achievement gap in America is substantially attributable to residential segregation.

"After the abolition of discrimination on buses and lunch counters, African Americans could take any empty seat on a bus or sit at any lunch counter. But the Fair Housing Act's prohibition of future discrimination in housing left previously segregated neighborhoods in tact.

"Americans have rationalized our failure to achieve desegregated neighborhoods by adopting a national myth shared by the left and right, by blacks and whites: that what we see around us is de facto, not legally enforced, segregation. It's the result not of a government design to keep the races separated but rather or a private prejudice, the personal preferences of both blacks and whites to live with same-race neighbors, and income differences that make integrated communities unaffordable to many African Americans.

"This is a small part of the truth. In reality, explicit government policy in the mid-20th century--imposed in the name of promoting safety and social harmony--was the most powerful force separating the races in every metropolitan area, and the effects of that policy endure. Because racial segregation results from the open, racially explicit, purposeful action of federal, state, and local governments, our residential racial boundaries are unconstitutional; because they are unconstitutional we have an obligation to ensure that our government remedies them; because we have forgotten the history of how residential segregation was created by government, we are handicapped in our ability to address it."

Read the whole thing here.

Richard Rothstein is also the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segegated America.

For interactive maps on racial segregation in Santa Clara County, read here.

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