Research Guides: Systemic Racism: Economic Injustice

Background Reading

Corporate America has Failed Black America
June 2020 article from the New York Times
America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods
June 2018 article from City Reports
The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950
Opinion piece by David Leonhart, published in the New York Times, June 2020

Solutions to Economic Injustice

Michael Tubbs on universal basic income: 'The Issue with Poverty is a Lack of Cash'
Interview with Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs published in The Guardian, March 2019
What is Owed
Investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones makes the case for reparations. Published in the NYTimes magazine, June 2020.
The Black Lives Next Door
Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, proposes that banks and real estate companies that created segregated neighborhoods can create privately funded reparations.
The Way Out of America’s Zero-Sum Thinking on Race and Wealth
Public policy strategist Heather McGhee claims "the evidence shows we all lose when society’s overwhelmed by white resentment and win when we organize across our differences."

Redlining & Urban Renewal

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Call Number: E185.61 .R8185 2017
Publication Date: 2018
New York Times Bestseller * Notable Book of the Year * Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates' "Amazing Books" of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award This "powerful and disturbing history" exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a "masterful" (Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam
NY Times article on urban renewal by Kevin M. Kruse, August 14, 2019. From the 1619 Project. The intertwined history of infrastructure and racial inequality extended into the 1950s and 1960s with the creation of the Interstate highway system. The federal government shouldered nine-tenths of the cost of the new Interstate highways, but local officials often had a say in selecting the path. As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta — local expressways at first, then Interstates — were steered along routes that bulldozed “blighted” neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities.
Opinion: Want to tear down insidious monuments to racism and segregation? Bulldoze L.A. freeways
Opinion piece by Matthew Fleischer of the Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2020.