The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

I did not find this book to be exceptionally well written, although it is organized and concise, but it is the book that made me really really angry about structural racism up to and including the present day. Rather than just exploring with the history of racism in America and exploring it's roots, as in Isabel Wilkerson's brilliantly written 'Caste', this book demonstrates the systematic racism preventing African Americans from participating in economic and social growth through the regulation of where they can live. This is the book that made me feel once and for all that reparations are the only way to start, just start, not end, but to start the process of healing the deep, entrenched wounds of slavery. Enough is enough. The country needs to say that we were terribly terrible wrong, that over the last 400 years we have been an oppressive regime for the offspring of former slaves. And it is not just your ancestors that did this, it is going on today. Those of us who say nothing and do nothing bear the blame as well. This book once and for all puts to rest the myth that racial segregation of our neighborhoods has long been viewed as a manifestation of unscrupulous real estate agents, unethical mortgage lenders, and exclusionary covenants working outside the law. No, it is the law and explicit public policy at work. The author breaks down, in case after case, that the truth is private activity could not have imposed segregation without explicit government policies (de jure segregation rather than de facto) designed to ensure the separation of African Americans from whites. The impact has been devastating for generations of African-Americans who were denied the right to live where they wanted to live, and raise and school their children where they could flourish most successfully. The author convincingly argues that the government and our courts, all the way up to the Roberts court, have upheld racist policies to maintain the separation of whites and blacks—leading to the powder keg that has defined Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Chicago. Black Lives Matter.