Donald Trump has opened a new, terribly ill-advised battle in his war on affirmative action. His target is no longer just racial preferences, an issue where Trump had strong public support. Instead, Trump’s new enemy appears to be racial diversity itself—something most Americans support in educational settings when it is achieved by giving a break to the economically disadvantaged of all races. A Trump Department of Justice memorandum, for instance, has declared that “criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used” if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus. 

Given the president’s appalling history on matters of race, this development, while troubling, is not particularly surprising. What is mystifying is that a pillar of the higher education establishment recently went along with Trump. Earlier this month, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it would stop making a tool called Landscape available to colleges, which is designed to help identify high-achieving low-income students of all races. The organization cited as its reason the way in which “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.” 

The decision represents the worst kind of capitulation. Landscape, as the College Board noted, “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” Instead, it allowed colleges to consider a student’s achievement in light of the socioeconomic makeup of his or her neighborhood and high school. Neighborhood factors included median family income, typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates. High school factors included the share of students eligible for subsidized lunch, the proportion taking AP exams, and the average SAT score. The idea was that if a student does pretty well academically despite these educational challenges, they have something special to offer. 

As a critic of racial preferences and a strong supporter of affirmative action based on economic class, I was enthusiastic about Landscape and proud of a small role in its development. I served as a sounding board as the College Board developed the tool. As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, which challenged racial preferences at Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and later the U.S. Naval Academy, I testified that looking at the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods and high schools was both fair and a good way of promoting racial and economic diversity without racial preferences. In September 2024, I favorably cited Landscape in my testimony for Students for Fair Admissions in the Naval Academy case, arguing that it was an important tool that could be used to promote racial diversity without racial preferences. 

After Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, the administration and conservative activists and thinkers sought to move the legal goalposts. Last month, Commentary magazine published a cover story by Naomi Schaefer Riley, the conservative writer, arguing that the College Board’s Landscape tool was a tool for racial discrimination.  

Riley was particularly suspicious that many of the factors that the College Board selected for Landscape—such as coming from a neighborhood with a high share of single-parent homes and with high crime rates—have a strong correlation with race. She noted: “In 2022, about 24 percent of white children were living in a home with only a mother, compared with 63 percent of all black children.” She was also dubious of employing crime statistics. “Incorporating crime rates by census tract into any admissions decisions, even controlling for income, will likely favor black students,” Riley wrote. She concluded that Landscape provided “a way to find out a student’s race without asking for it,” and “a way of surfacing race-based information surreptitiously.”  

This analysis is wrong on two fronts. To begin with, Riley’s notion that Landscape is a problem because it allows administrators to detect a student’s race is misplaced. There are much more efficient ways for admissions officers to know a student’s racial identity: through extracurriculars (are they a member of the Black Students Association?) and essays (what do they say when asked how they would contribute to a diverse student body?) The problem is not that admissions officers know a student’s race; it’s when they use that information to employ a racial preference. 

The second flaw in Riley’s analysis is that, as a matter of fairness, it’s relevant to consider whether a student grew up in a high-crime or low-crime area, or where a lot of their peers come from single-parent homes. As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, living in a neighborhood with a large share of single-parent households predicts opportunity in America. A student of any race who lives in such a neighborhood and nevertheless does fairly well shows grit and determination. The fact that, on average, Black students face this extra disadvantage is hardly a reason to ignore this factor. 

The irony is that while Riley thinks Landscape is a surreptitious route for achieving racial diversity, die-hard advocates of racial preferences fault it for the opposite reason. They worry that too many white and Asian students will benefit from race-neutral strategies. These supporters of racial preferences fault the economic approach for failing to help well-off Black and Hispanic students whom they believe bring important diversity to campus. Paradoxically, those of the far right and the far left, preoccupied by race, ignore larger issues of economic inequality.  

The College Board’s decision to jettison Landscape is particularly perplexing because a majority of Supreme Court justices were clear in their landmark 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that using socioeconomic factors is perfectly legal. In his concurring opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed favorably to my expert testimony that “Harvard could nearly replicate the current racial composition of its student body without resorting to race-based practices if it: 1. provided socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants just half of the tip it gives recruited athletes; and 2. eliminated tips for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty.” 

In oral arguments before the Court over the use of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the justices peppered Students for Fair Admissions about whether it would challenge policies like socioeconomic preferences as a form of proxy discrimination.  

In response, Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, said that while SFFA would likely oppose “a pure proxy for race” such as a preference for the descendants of those who were enslaved, other programs—such as socioeconomic or geographic preferences—would be legal because there would be a “race-neutral justification” for adopting those plans. Strawbridge declared, “If the only reason to do it [adopt a race-neutral strategy] is through the narrow lens of race and there is no other race-neutral justification, that’s the only scenario where it would create problems.” The College Board’s Landscape tool can be justified on multiple grounds—as a way to pursue true merit (accomplishments in light of hurdles surmounted), to achieve the benefits of socioeconomic diversity, and to garner more ideological diversity (given America’s diploma divide in voting)—as well as to achieve more racial diversity. 

Since the 2023 SFFA decision, further evidence has emerged that a Landscape-like program is on solid legal ground. In 2024, when the Pacific Legal Foundation pressed the argument that using socioeconomic and geographic factors constitutes “proxy discrimination,” the Supreme Court twice turned down the opportunity to pursue that path. Over the vigorous dissents of the most conservative justices, the Court declined to hear a case involving Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, in February and another involving the Boston Exam Schools in December. 

Given this, the real shame is that Democratic activists and politicians have not vocally challenged the College Board for its puzzling surrender. For years, Democrats were on the defensive on affirmative action, given the unpopularity of racial preferences. Now they (as well as Republicans and Independents) can champion a legally sound and politically popular approach to boost social mobility and racial integration. The silence is deafening. 

The post The College Board Capitulates to Trump appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In a moment when the President of the United States is trying to use the power of the state to intimidate critics in academia and the media (not to mention his political opponents), some may think that a new book like Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent, which focuses mainly on the illiberalism of the left, is terribly timed. They will fault the author for not “meeting the moment,” or worse, for “enabling” an autocrat by articulating “right-wing talking points.” Liberal critics have already panned the volume in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York magazine.  

In fact, the book by Williams, an iconoclastic writer for The Atlantic, could not have come at a better moment. It is precisely because Donald Trump is wreaking havoc daily that it’s crucial to comprehend why so many of our fellow Americans came to dislike the Democrats even more than the unlikable and chaotic man they elected president. How is it that a November 2024 survey of working-class Americans found that 58 percent believed Democrats have moved “too far left,”  a share that is 11 points higher than the share that believed Republicans have moved “too far right” (47 percent)? 

As Williams writes: “If the purpose is to understand the political and moral disaster in which we now find ourselves—and not merely to signal our enlightenment in relation to it—an unsentimental assessment of the social justice left, and the agenda-setting institutions that repeatedly caved and pandered to its excesses, is not only reasonable but obligatory.” Although Williams does not provide a complete explanation of our current predicament, he supplies a number of powerful clues about what went wrong. 

It is important to note at the outset that Williams supports many liberal goals. He believes the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements were initially animated by a healthy desire to extend “dignity and recognition” to more Americans. He favors police reform and “a floor of universal dignity that expands access to health care, day care, and quality public education.” The son of a Black father and a white mother, Williams says “the story of American racism is not merely an abstraction to me.” And Williams labels Trump “a pathologically dissembling and race-baiting con man lacking basic curiosity and qualifications.” 

But just as socialists hated Communists for ruining their egalitarian dream, Williams’s dismay with rising left-wing illiberalism is acutely felt. The book, which examines the period between the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 and of Trump in 2024, abounds with examples of betrayals, especially after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. 

A healthy concern about racial equality, particularly among white elites, morphed into an unbalanced focus that many Americans, including many Americans of color, found alienating on a host of issues. 

Most Americans believe in the rule of law, but in August 2020, NPR published what Williams calls “a wildly credulous interview” with a white author whose book was entitled In Defense of Looting. The publisher’s blurb claimed, “Our beliefs in the innate righteousness of property and ownership … are built on the history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous oppression.” At a time when minority-owned businesses burned to the ground,  the book’s author explained to NPR, “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” The mindset had disastrous results in the real world. After a majority of Minneapolis’s city council pledged to “dismantle” the police department, homicides increased 50 percent amid an overall police staffing shortage. To his credit, Joe Biden denounced the “defund the police” slogan and pushed for more cops on the streets. But left-leaning social activists left a powerful impression with voters. According to a November 2024 Blueprint survey, 68 percent of swing voters who chose Trump said the Democrats were “not doing enough to address crime.” 

In 2019, a Pew survey showed that the vast majority of Americans—74 percent—believed that people of all races should be treated equally in employment and education. Yet, among progressive activists, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist became all the rage.  Kendi famously argued, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” 

Surveys found that many Americans—including 84 percent of Black Americans—worried about not being able to speak their minds. Yet, when Williams and other leading authors and artists organized a July 2020 letter in Harper’s magazine, making what Williams called a “frankly anodyne”  statement about free speech, they received an enormous backlash among progressive activists. The critics, Williams says, failed to understand a fundamental lesson: “Free speech is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances, particularly those of ethnic, numerical, ideological, and other minorities.” 

In the summer of 2020, average Americans were bewildered by the conflicting advice provided by progressive experts about whether or not it was safe to congregate in large numbers outdoors with a pandemic in full swing. Progressives chastised Florida sunbathers for their reckless behavior. Still, shortly thereafter, when thousands  of protesters gathered in response to George Floyd’s murder, a number of public health officials approved of the gatherings. Williams observed, “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street.” 

Finally, average Americans were flummoxed by the reaction on elite college campuses to the massacre of peaceful Jewish Israelis on October 7, 2023. “The surprise slaughter of twelve hundred men, women, and children in Israel, as well as the abduction of 250 more,” Williams notes, was not something Hamas tried to hide. “There were no attempts to cover up the revolting evidence or to blame it on rogue ‘bad apples.’” Instead, Hamas videotaped it all and disseminated it proudly. Astonishingly, some students at Harvard, Columbia and elsewhere lay the blame of the massacre entirely at the feet of Israel itself. A group of 34 Harvard student organizations, for example, published a statement days after the attack in which they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” 

To its credit, the Biden administration wholeheartedly rejected the view of these progressive activists who blamed the pogrom on Israel, but Williams is correct that the issue revealed a troubling class divide in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was aligned with the well-heeled. As the Washington Monthly’s careful analysis showed, students in predominately working-class colleges, perhaps because many of them were more likely to be focused on trying to get ahead, did not often partake in the 2024 left-wing Gaza protests to the same extent as the students in more privileged elite campuses. 

To be clear, as the war dragged on and civilian casualties in Gaza mounted, most Americans came to recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war became deeply disturbing. Williams himself notes the “ferocity of Israel’s reaction, which frequently amounted to collective punishment.” Those later developments, however, do not excuse the initial reaction of many progressive activists to Hamas’s attack. 

Some will say activists are always prone to excess. But Williams relentlessly cites examples of how the attitudes of left-wing demonstrators, particularly during the summer of 2020, bled into mainstream institutions—the media, museums, and corporations. 

CNN, for example, seemed to excuse violent protests. Most famously, Williams notes, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “in front of a large building blanketed by leaping flames,” the CNN chyron read, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” The New York Times, which had published op-eds by Muammar Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and a leader of the Taliban, pushed an editor to resign for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s column suggesting that the military should stop the rioting and looting. Cotton’s position is not one I agree with, but it was not beyond the pale. It was a policy supported by “58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans,” Williams writes. 

Surprisingly, race essentialist ideas were circulated not just by white nationalists but by mainstream institutions. The venerable Smithsonian Institution published a poster that identified hard work and “the nuclear family” as aspects of “white culture.” Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, gave $10 million to an antiracist center at Boston University launched by Kendi, the scholar who called for “discrimination” to counteract racism. Meanwhile, the Academy Awards, Williams notes, required qualifying films “to meet racial quotas in order to be considered during awards season.” 

Biden and Harris were much more reasonable than progressive activists on a host of these issues, but too often, they fell into the same trap. For example, Biden claimed during the 2020 campaign that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”—a statement Williams calls “insulting” and “counterproductive.”   

The decision by many progressives and Democratic politicians to make identity “the single most potent prism through which all matters of discussion and dispute … are now unceasingly filtered” had damaging electoral ramifications, Williams writes, because it didn’t comport with the daily lives of voters. Research from Harvard’s Raj Chetty made clear that parental income, rather than their race, is increasingly dictating the fundamental issue of social mobility. While George Floyd’s murder was seen almost exclusively through a racial lens, says Williams, the fact that he was poor was “the most salient fact about his life.” After all, Williams notes, Floyd “died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess.”   

When the issue of racial preferences came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 in a case involving Harvard University, the Biden administration arguably prioritized the interests of upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic families over working Americans of all races.  Harvard’s system of large racial preferences and legacy preferences worked well for economically advantaged students of all races. More than 70 percent of Black and Hispanic students came from the richest 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic families nationally, and the white and Asian students were even richer. Rather than backing a system of affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students of all races, however, Biden backed Harvard. 

After the 2024 election, liberals, who were fixated on race, puzzled over how on earth Trump could appeal to an increasing share of nonwhite voters, yielding what Williams calls “the least racially polarized election since 1972.” But to Williams, the result is not surprising. For nonwhite working-class voters, issues of racial reckoning didn’t touch their most pressing concerns, which centered around economic well-being. The “racial reckoning” of 2020, he writes, became “a professional-class affair, existing on another plane entirely from working-class reality.” 

Although Williams focuses mostly on the shortcomings of the left, he is unsparing about Trump as well. He devotes a chilling chapter to “The Spectacle of January 6,” in which he recounts the horrific day: “the cartoonish shaman; the even-keeled man with ominous-looking zip ties on his waistband; the unshaven fool with his feet up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk” as well as the mob “threatening to exact vengeance on the Vice-President.”   

Why were working-class voters more willing to forgive the extremists on the right? In one of the book’s most glaring shortcomings, Williams doesn’t really advance a theory about this important question. It seems possible that because mainstream establishment institutions were more willing to embrace radical views on the left, voters felt more exposed to them—a phenomenon that Fox News then amplified with glee. It is also possible that the extremism on the right is less difficult for working-class voters to stomach because it doesn’t come with the same strong sense of moral condescension that progressive activists (many of them economically well off) exude. 

Going forward, if Democrats want to win back America’s working class, they need to frame the necessary work of addressing race as a subset of the larger set of challenges facing working people across racial lines. They should emphasize race-neutral policies that serve all Americans who struggle, including working-class whites and underprivileged minorities alike. Such policies could include, for example, boosting funding for regional public and community colleges, as the Monthly’s Paul Glastris has argued.  

Likewise, Democrats need to explicitly and loudly distance themselves from deeply unpopular progressive activist ideas of the type Williams describes. The two most successful Democratic presidents of the last four decades—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—both did so: Clinton when he denounced Sister Souljah and Obama when he criticized the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Biden and Harris, by contrast, did nothing so dramatic. 

Pundits have pointed to many factors that contributed to Trump’s 2024 election—with inflation and immigration looming large—but cultural disconnect also played an important role. As Democrats take a look in the mirror about what went wrong, Summer of Our Discontent should be high on their reading lists. In America’s continuing discussions of race, liberals can take pride in holding the high moral ground over Donald Trump, but they should also heed the warning from Camus that Williams cites in the book’s epigraph: “I have seen people behave badly with great morality.” 

The post The Eternal Social Justice Summer  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For months, Harvard University has been very much in the news, little of it good. Earlier this year, its president, Claudine Gay, resigned after giving disastrous Congressional testimony on antisemitism and being charged with plagiarism. Last June, the Supreme Court held that Harvard’s racial preference policies in student admissions violated the Civil Rights Act. The university is now being investigated as to whether its use of preferences for the children of alumni also violates civil rights laws. Critics abound on both the left and right.

So the timing is propitious for Derek Bok, who served as president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006 to 2007, to publish Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities. Bok’s book is wide-ranging, focusing on issues from free speech on campus and the ideological tilt of students and faculty to union organizing of graduate students and calls by students to divest university endowments from certain corporations.

But at its heart, Attacking the Elites focuses on student admissions. For years, Bok presided over a university whose selection process granted preferences to legacies, donors, children of faculty, athletes, and upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic students—to the almost complete exclusion of poor and working-class students. Now, in the wake of the Court’s striking down racial preferences in university admissions, Bok calls for rethinking these policies. The 93-year-old includes a number of delightful surprises and qualified reversals of his previous positions. Having stood atop the pinnacle of America’s educational establishment, the change in direction could auger a better future for students and the nation’s leadership class.

If Gay, a Black woman, was supposed to represent the new Harvard, Bok stands for the old Ivy League of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. He is the great-grandson of the founder of a publishing empire that included Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, the grandson of a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the son of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.

For most of his life, Bok has epitomized the prevailing species of modern American liberalism. Whereas Franklin D. Roosevelt, another patrician, understood the needs of working-class communities but tolerated and perpetuated the terrible mistreatment of Black people in his New Deal programs, Bok has represented a version of liberalism that does the reverse. For decades, he has for years shown an admirable appreciation for the need to take steps to lift Black Americans, but a glaring blind spot to addressing socioeconomic inequalities, even as America’s economic divide has grown.

In the late 1990s, Bok co-authored, with William Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, the seminal defense of racial preferences in college admissions, The Shape of the River. This study receives a fair amount of discussion in Attacking the Elites. The authors studied 45,000 students at 28 elite universities and found that beneficiaries of affirmative action went on to live productive lives, which contributed greatly to the nation. As Bok observes, the research was cited in the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger to sustain racial preferences for another generation.

But as I noted in a review of the book in these pages at the time (See “Style, not Substance,” Washington Monthly, November 1998), while Bowen and Bok were right about the successes of racial affirmative action, they exhibited an unwarranted pessimism about the academic abilities of low-income and working-class students.

The moral power of affirmative action comes from the connection between the horrible mistreatment of Black people in America and the remaining economic disadvantage faced by African Americans as a group to this day. When the connection between class and race is severed in individual cases, however, the argument loses much of its force, which is why Barack Obama said his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences. Yet Bowen and Bok found that 86 percent of Black students at elite colleges were middle or upper class, and this finding was presented not as a bug but as a necessary feature of elite college admissions. The authors asserted: “The problem is not that poor but qualified candidates go undiscovered, but that there are simply too few of these candidates in the first place.”

After the Supreme Court upheld the use of racial preferences in university admissions in the 2003 Grutter case, Bok’s coauthor, William Bowen, recanted his skepticism of low-income students. In a 2005 book (which I also reviewed in these pages), Bowen found that it would, in fact, be possible to substantially raise the number of low-income students at selective colleges and maintain high academic standards.

Now, a quarter century after The Shape of the River, Bok’s new book provides a highly welcome (if sometimes qualified) reversal. He acknowledges blockbuster research from Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, which found that America produces 35,000 very high-achieving low-income students every year. Bok admits that during his 20-year tenure at Harvard, elite universities gave very little extra consideration to low-income students, but he now writes: “Selective colleges should surely give low-income applicants with strong high school records some extra credit for having displayed the resilience and determination to overcome a series of disadvantages.”

Still, at times, Bok continues to display his old hesitancy. In explaining why so few highly qualified low-income students even apply to selective colleges, he doesn’t blame elite universities. Instead, he speculates that some “may feel that they would not feel welcome or be happy at highly competitive institutions filled with classmates from backgrounds so different than their own.” Oddly, he does not follow this with a call to change the culture of elite institutions to make them more hospitable.

And Bok continues to raise concerns that “income-based admissions” won’t produce much racial diversity, citing research by Stanford University’s Sean Reardon and Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale. He’s technically correct, but it’s also a strawman argument. Although Bok’s book suggests that I advocate that approach, I support universities looking at family income in combination with factors such as neighborhood poverty levels and levels of family wealth—circumstances that powerfully predict opportunity in America. Including those additional factors will benefit Black and Hispanic applicants considerably more, on average, than income-based affirmative action because—controlling for income—Black and Hispanic students are much more likely to come from high-poverty neighborhoods and families with low wealth. When those factors are included, Carnevale has found that economic affirmative action produces high levels of racial diversity.

Of course, some working-class Asian and white students will be admitted as well under a system of class-based affirmative action, as they should be. Given the voting patterns of their parents, opening the doors to such students may address a separate problem that Bok properly identifies: Only 1.6 percent of Harvard students identified as conservatives in 2022. This stunning lack of ideological diversity is bad for education, and it also undercuts public support for higher education among conservatives, Bok notes.

I credit Bok for recognizing, even grudgingly, the data suggesting that high-achieving, low-income students are present in significant numbers, and I also applaud the nonagenarian for another stunning reversal. For two decades, it was standard practice at the university Bok led to provide unfair admissions preferences for the children of alumni, donors, and faculty members, as well as preferences for athletes in boutique sports like fencing and squash. As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, I helped document in detail how these policies worked and their adverse effects on racial and economic diversity. In Attacking the Elites, Bok now says university leaders should “abandon” these preferences for the wealthy.

What changed Bok’s mind? A moral awakening, perhaps? Ever the pragmatist, Bok supplies a different answer: Universities can no longer get away with it. The efforts to employ these preferences for wealthy applicants “in hopes these practices will not be noticed have not succeeded. The admissions policies of leading universities have been clearly exposed to public view through lawsuits over racial preferences.” The jig is up, he correctly argues, and continuing to employ these preferences will only invite government action.

During the litigation, it should be noted Harvard vigorously defended these practices. Interestingly, in the acknowledgments, Bok thanks Yale University Press for accommodating “my desire to delay publication until after the Supreme Court announced its decision on the legality of admissions preferences for minority applicants.”

Now that the Court has ruled, universities must rethink their policies. As Colorado College President Song Richardson has argued, “Affirmative action made us complacent. Now that tool is gone, and I’m optimistic that all of us can work together to fix our broken system.” Much to my surprise and delight, Attacking the Elites provides powerful insights into how to do so.

The post A Harvard Champion of Affirmative Action Accepts Reality appeared first on Washington Monthly.

 In 2017, Richard Rothstein published The Color of Law, a stunning indictment of 20th-century American policy makers, Democrats and Republicans alike, who systematically discriminated against Black citizens in order to socially engineer pervasive racial residential segregation—a tragedy that endures to this day. 

The book, which I reviewed in the Monthly, amassed considerable evidence about the array of tools white policy makers employed to bring about segregation: racial zoning, racial redlining, and state enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, among others. These government actions—much more than private discrimination or consumer choice—created not only high levels of racial segregation but also the resulting wealth and opportunity gaps between Black and white Americans. If this argument now sounds like conventional wisdom, Rothstein deserves much of the credit for making it so. 

The book was a blockbuster, selling almost 1 million copies, and led the broader public generally, and housing policy makers in particular, to engage in a long-overdue reflection about how racism tilted the residential playing field against Black Americans in a way that has never been fully redressed. 

The Color of Law was a work of history and did not offer detailed public policy prescriptions. Many readers asked, “What can we do?” Now Rothstein and his daughter, the housing policy expert Leah Rothstein, seek to answer just that question in a new book, Just Action. (Disclosure: I have known Richard Rothstein casually for a quarter century, and he contributed a chapter to a book I edited on educational inequality in 2000.)

What is to be done? The Rothsteins offer several smart ideas, backed up by engaging stories from various parts of the country about how the reforms played out. Unfortunately, however, they also consistently fall into a common trap among elites on the left: assuming that because a problem has a racial origin, the best remedy is not just anti-discrimination policies but also racial preference policies (such as those providing special home down payment assistance limited to Black people). These approaches are legally vulnerable and politically unsustainable, and fail to appreciate the changing nature of inequality in America. 

The book starts out promisingly enough, by highlighting for readers the imperative of dismantling racial segregation. Residential segregation, the authors argue, is not only a fountainhead of racial inequality, it also helps polarize the country politically by keeping many Black and white Americans from getting to know one another better as neighbors and school classmates. Although it is easier to put a “Black Lives Matter” sign on your lawn than take steps to dismantle segregation, they say, people need to do both if they want to make a real difference. 

In a series of chapters, the authors propose a number of good ideas—being implemented in real places—to combat racial discrimination and support economically disadvantaged people of all races. 

Real estate agents today sometimes steer home seekers to neighborhoods based on their race. In Long Island, for example, Newsday sent paired testers of different races who had the same goals and same financial circumstances, and found that agents treated Black buyers differently from white buyers almost half of the time. The Rothsteins appropriately call for more funding of fair housing centers that send out testers to expose such discrimination for prosecution. 

The Rothsteins also correctly recognize that ostensibly race-neutral policies—like zoning policies that discriminate by income by prohibiting multifamily housing—play a big role in perpetuating racial segregation. They write, “Single-family zoning may be the most powerful policy that perpetuates racial inequality.” The authors give the example of two nearby Connecticut communities, Woodbridge and New Haven. In Woodbridge, 98 percent of residential lots are zoned for single-family homes only on lot sizes of at least an acre, whereas New Haven is relatively open to multifamily homes and has many renters. Affluent Woodbridge is “almost-all-white,” while Black and Hispanic people make up two-thirds of the population in New Haven. The Rothsteins note that it’s possible to change exclusionary zoning laws, pointing to recently successful efforts in California and Oregon to end single-family exclusive zoning throughout those states. 

The Rothsteins outline other good ideas. They suggest providing an incentive for states to locate affordable housing near well-resourced public schools. They applaud Washington State’s law to make discrimination against Section 8 housing choice voucher holders illegal—and to make landlords who violate the law pay “more than four times the monthly rent, court costs, and attorney fees.” To avoid unfair evictions, Cleveland provides tenants with a right to free legal counsel in eviction proceedings, another smart policy the authors highlight. 

The Rothsteins take a serious wrong turn, however, when they back a series of reforms that are not anti-discriminatory or universal but instead take the form of what they refer to as “racially explicit preferences.” 

Government support for helping people come up with a down payment for purchasing a home, they say, should “target assistance explicitly to moderate- and lower-income black home buyers.” They call for investing in “segregated black neighborhoods” as opposed to struggling Hispanic, Asian, or white neighborhoods. And when “inclusionary zoning” laws require new developments to include some subsidized housing, the Rothsteins say “regulations should authorize racial preferences for the below market-rate units.” 

In theory, this approach has some appeal; Black people were targeted in the 20th century for unequal treatment, so they should receive preference today to even things out, the logic suggests. This view has gained traction in recent years—particularly in elite white circles—following the election of a racist president in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020. 

Although now in vogue among some highly educated white Democrats and some Black people, the racial preference approach in housing that the Rothsteins champion is legally untenable and politically disastrous, and also fails to recognize the rising salience of class in American housing.

As a legal matter, a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court is increasingly skeptical of the type of racial preference programs the Rothsteins advance in the housing arena. The authors are fully aware of this and have a jarring response: Progressives should “dare to defy” the Supreme Court. When the Court rejects racial preference policies in housing, they say, policy makers should simply “ignore the Court’s arrogant and unsupportable views.” Likewise, when the Court struck down race-based school integration programs in 2007, the authors argue, “school boards and superintendents should have replied that the case was ‘of no authority’ and gone ahead with their race-conscious remedies.” 

The Rothsteins say their position of defiance is “controversial.” I would call it breathtaking and lawless. One of the hallmarks of a liberal democracy is that the rule of law must be respected. The way to challenge bad Court decisions is to win the argument—either by advancing new legal theories or by electing presidents and senators who will, over time, appoint and confirm wiser justices. In cases where the Court is interpreting a statute rather than the Constitution, Congress can correct ill-considered rulings with new legislation. Simply ignoring the law of the land is ineffective and makes it easier for right-wing ideologues to try to do the same the next time they disagree with a decision.

The second fundamental problem with the authors’ approach is that it is deeply unpopular and will invite a backlash. Black people represent only 14 percent of the population; they need allies to bring about political change. On one level, the authors recognize this. They call for the creation of “biracial” committees of Black people and enlightened whites to push for integration. 

But that approach is unlikely to succeed in advancing racial preferences in housing. To begin with, the “biracial” language is anachronistic in a society where the Hispanic population is larger than the Black population, and Asian Americans are the fastest-
growing group. (Even Representative Maxine Waters, who has been properly criticized by the Monthly for suggesting that only disadvantaged people of color should receive down payment assistance, offers a broader tent than the Rothsteins’ plan to provide such support only to Black people.) More generally, a wide body of scholarship, including experimental research in 2021, has found that a racial framing of policies makes them less popular, not more. 

Of course, some will say the political unpopularity of racial justice framing is simply more proof of American racism, but there is another possible explanation. Maybe working-class Hispanic, Asian, Black, and white people are more keenly attuned than upper-middle-class whites to the idea that a focus on racial preferences ignores the injuries of class.

Throughout Just Action, the Rothsteins consistently assume that opposition to housing reforms is purely racial. They speak, for example, of zoning policies that “conspire to keep some areas all-white.” But the researcher Myron Orfield has found that the percentage of people living in suburbs that are more than 80 percent white has fallen to 18 percent. Walter Mondale, the late senator and vice president, and a lead champion of the Fair Housing Act, noted in 2018 that “almost 45 percent of suburban residents in the largest metropolitan areas live in racially diverse suburbs. These suburbs—the children of the Fair Housing Act—are some of the nation’s most wonderful places.”

The nature of housing inequality is changing. Since 1970, Black-white segregation has declined by 30 percent while income segregation has doubled. The Rothsteins frame the opposition to zoning reform in Woodbridge, home to highly educated white Democrats, as a failure of residents to welcome Black people. This will likely be an unconvincing argument to most residents, who surely would embrace—indeed celebrate—a Black doctor or faculty member from Yale who moves to the community. Research shows that highly educated people are less racially biased than those with less education. 

Something else is going on in exclusive affluent communities. Importantly, researchers find, it’s not that people in places like Woodbridge lack bias. For highly educated people, the “targets of prejudice are different”: They dislike those who have less education. This problem cuts across racial lines. For decades, as Sheryll Cashin has noted, “Black elites” have engaged in “social distancing” from Black people from the agrarian South by “trying to live apart” from them.

If the Rothsteins’ racial preference approach is legally problematic and politically challenging, and also ignores shifting realities in America, what can be done? The successful reforms to end exclusionary single-family zoning in California and Oregon that the Rothsteins mention in passing are instructive. In Oregon, legislators built a bipartisan multiracial coalition that included urban and rural areas allied against the suburbs, and in California, the vote also broke down along class, rather than partisan, lines. Working-class people, no matter their race, don’t like being looked down on and excluded. Emphasizing the common exclusion across racial lines—through policies like an Economic Fair Housing Act, which would give the right to sue for zoning that unjustifiably discriminates by income—is much more likely to repeat the successes in California and Oregon than the Rothsteins’ racial preference approach. 

Importantly, the class approach would have strong benefits for Black people. In many areas, for example, it’s not necessary to set aside spots in inclusionary zoning programs for Black people, as the Rothsteins have advocated. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, 72 percent of students who benefited from an income-based inclusionary zoning program were Black. And in Milwaukee, the Rothsteins say, “nearly all” the beneficiaries of an income-based housing mobility program were Black people. 

Overall, Just Action does an admirable job of laying out a number of promising ideas that activists can push localities, states, and the federal government to pursue in order to provide Black people with greater protection against racial discrimination and help uplift disadvantaged people of all races. 

The racial preference policies the authors propose, by contrast, bring to mind the white suburbanites who post “Black Lives Matter” signs. They might make the advocates feel good, but in terms of enacting meaningful change in the real world, it is much more productive to stick to politically feasible, legally sustainable ideas that reflect the realities of 21st-century America. To address the harms that Richard Rothstein brilliantly laid out in The Color of Law, it is crucial that advocates pursue ideas that will work in practice and begin to transform the country.

The post Erasing the Color Lines appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In January 2021, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear an appeal challenging Harvard’s use of racial preferences in college admissions, the institution’s president, Larry Bacow, sent a note to the university community positioning Harvard as a righteous champion of social justice. The Court, he wrote, was threatening Harvard’s ability “to create diverse campus communities that enrich education for all.”

But as the City University of New York professor Evan Mandery shows in his lively and trenchant new book, Poison Ivy, Harvard’s lofty pronouncements about racial inclusion elide an important part of the story: The school does not remotely reflect America’s class diversity. Unless the country were to magically transform itself to have 20 times as many rich people as poor people, as Harvard does, the school will remain a highly unrepresentative bastion of privilege.

Poison Ivy arrives at a time when elite college admission practices are under a microscope. The litigation in the Supreme Court over affirmative action unearthed a treasure trove of data revealing in vivid detail how a variety of university practices—from legacy preferences to the preferences for the children of faculty—tilt admissions toward the wealthy. Mandery takes full advantage of this new information as he considers how the Ivy League reproduces inequality by grooming wealthy kids for the sorts of careers that will make them still wealthier. 

Mandery presents his indictment with an appealing blend of storytelling and hard data. And he adroitly draws on his firsthand experiences with elite and less selective education. Mandery attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where he met unimaginably rich students and witnessed graduates line up to represent the interests of America’s wealthiest institutions. But for 20 years, he has been teaching a largely working-class population of students at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where 60 percent of graduates go to work for nonprofits or government. 

Mandery’s vantage point helps him detect when elite universities are blowing smoke. Harvard tries to obscure its lack of socioeconomic diversity, for example, by highlighting that it provides a free ride to any student from a family making less than $65,000 a year, which is, to be sure, a good thing. But Harvard’s story about generous financial aid, writes Mandery, is “as misleading as those television commercials from Shell and other energy giants that advertise their commitment to developing clean energy alternatives—not a lie, exactly, but fundamentally misleading.” Precious few students have the chance to take advantage of the offer: Just 3 percent of Harvard students come from the bottom 20 percent by income, while 15 percent come from the top 1 percent of earners. Mandery notes that at elite colleges, students from the top 1 percent by income have a 77 times greater chance of attending than those from the bottom economic quintile. “Their core business isn’t lifting poor kids out of poverty,” he writes. “It’s keeping rich kids rich.”

In recent years, elite universities have bragged about an uptick in the number of students they admit who are eligible for Pell Grants, the federal program to assist students from families of modest means. In 2021, Yale crowed that the Pell-eligible student population had increased 70 percent since 2014. But as Mandery shows, this too may be misleading. Some universities have cynically learned to make their numbers look good by cherry-picking students just below the Pell financial cutoff and excluding those slightly above it. According one study Mandery cites, “applicants just below the Pell line were ten times more likely to be admitted as students just above the line.” 

But what about Harvard’s use of racial preferences for Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, which it is defending in the Supreme Court? Doesn’t that help the disadvantaged? Not exactly. The litigation (in which I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs) revealed that 71 percent of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students at Harvard are from roughly the top socioeconomic fifth of each of those racial groups. While only 10 percent of Black Americans are first- or second-generation immigrants, Mandery notes, more than 40 percent of those at the Ivy League are, and they are much more likely to be the children of highly educated and wealthy parents than most Black Americans. 

Working-class Black students at elite colleges are shocked when they arrive on campus. At Amherst, Anthony Jack, a Black student who grew up poor, noted, “Even the students of color appeared to have parents who were investment bankers and consultants.” Another low-income Black student at Amherst, Edmund Kennedy, said he was stunned when COVID-19 hit the campus. “The other students are saying, ‘We’re going to go to our house in LA or we’re going to take our plane to Cabo until this blows over.’” The working-class students, meanwhile, were saying, “We can ask our cousin in Boise who’s got an extra basement or whatever.” Kennedy concluded that at Amherst, “The divide is between rich and poor. It’s the starkest divide I’ve ever seen in my life. Far more classist than racial.”

Worse, the use of racial preferences to benefit upper-middle-class students of color helps obscure a larger system of preferences for mostly wealthy white students. The most blatant of these preferences are those provided to the children of alumni, faculty, and staff. Each of these groups is disproportionately wealthy and white; an admissions regime that reflects the meritocracy and egalitarianism that Harvard claims to exalt would make these the very last applicants to receive a preference. But at Harvard, legacies receive a 40 percent boost in admissions. Overall, Mandery notes, 34 percent of Harvard legacies are admitted, compared with 5 percent of all applicants. The admissions rate for the children of faculty and staff is even higher, at 47 percent. Recruited athletes also receive a huge preference in admissions, and, contrary to what one might think watching college basketball or football, most of the athletes who benefit are white, Mandery writes. At elite colleges, precious spots are provided for students to play squash, to row crew, to fence or play lacrosse. (Some conservatives who oppose racial preferences incongruously support ancestry-based preferences for the children of alumni.) 

Insidiously, Mandery says, the catch-all term diversity (an important concept with respect to race and class) is now employed to justify the preferences afforded these wealthy white students. He writes, “On the diversity view, every person contributes to the university in their own way. Lacrosse players, legacies, and the children of faculty members are not symbols of a problem,” he continues. “Rather, their whiteness and affluence are contributions to the life of the college, and its academic discourse. Diversity sanitizes these advantages of birth and opportunity as cultural and intellectual contributions.” In a deposition in the affirmative action litigation, for example, Harvard’s dean, Rakesh Khurana, provided a particularly strained justification for legacy preferences when he suggested that it was important for Harvard to favor the children of alumni in order to bring students who “have more experience with Harvard” together with “others who are less familiar with Harvard.” The ability of these different groups to “exchange perspectives, points of view,” he claimed, would make “them more effective citizens and citizen leaders for society.”

Mandery’s indictment of elite colleges goes beyond their exclusion of low-income and working-class students. He also offers a searing critique of how universities shape the career goals of students once they arrive on campus. “It would be one thing if elite colleges turned affluent high school graduates into do-gooders,” Mandery says. “They do the opposite.” At Harvard, more than 70 percent of seniors apply to work at investment banks or consulting firms and just 4 percent go into public service or nonprofit work. Harvard used to produce doctors and lawyers, Mandery writes. “Not anymore. Only 4 percent of 2020 Harvard grads went into the health industry and only 3 percent into law.” 

Citing the work of the UC San Diego sociologist Amy Binder, Mandery notes that students generally begin at elite colleges motivated by idealism, but they lack a sense of direction, which investment banks and consulting firms exploit. These firms wine and dine students, who are not readily shown an alternative by their universities. The firms also prey on the competitive instinct of students at selective colleges. “They set up the recruiting process so that landing a job on Wall Street becomes the next big game to win,” Mandery writes. 

Why does the Ivy League operate this way? Colleges fundamentally compete over prestige, and that’s connected in part to the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Giving a break to low-income students hurts prestige in two ways, Mandery writes. Because low-income and working-class students haven’t enjoyed the educational advantages that wealthier students have, average SAT scores and GPAs will be lower if a college admits impressive low-income students who have overcome odds but haven’t had a chance to take SAT prep classes to boost their scores. And because students of modest means require financial aid, they take away from other investments that can boost a college’s rankings, like high faculty salaries and bigger libraries. (By contrast, the Washington Monthly’s guide to colleges rewards those institutions that promote social mobility, public service, and research.)

College leaders can try to push back against all the interests aligned against low-income students. Vanderbilt, for example, created the Opportunity Vanderbilt program to increase financial aid and the Zeppos Scholars program for students committed to public service. Under the leadership of president Cappy Hill, between 2006 and 2015 Vassar doubled its financial aid budget with the goal of admitting more low-income students—and did so despite knowing that “any dollar spent on need-based financial aid receives little credit in the U.S. News rankings,” as Hill told Mandery. As a result, the percentage of low-income students more than doubled. And at Bates, president Clayton Spencer opened the Center for Purposeful Work in 2014 to help students find meaningful careers. “I think of work as a very deep thing,” she told Mandery. “What you do needs to align with who you are.” At Bates, 30 percent of the graduating class enters the education or health care fields, compared to a 6 percent share at Harvard.

But there is only so much committed leaders can do without outside pressure. As Vanderbilt’s Nick Zeppos told Mandery, “When you’re president, you’ve got a limited number of bullets to shoot.” Federal legislation could push universities in the right direction, and Mandery mentions the unlikely duo of Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Vermont Democrat Peter Welch, who would like wealthy institutions to do more for low-income students. But the higher education lobby has kept most of those efforts in check thus far.

I believe that the most likely source to push universities to diversify by economic status is an unlikely one: our historically conservative Supreme Court. A decision curtailing the ability of universities to use race to recruit upper-income minority students, expected by June 2023, could inadvertently compel university admissions to focus on class disadvantage as a way of indirectly promoting racial diversity. 

That is what has happened in almost all of the nine states where racial preferences have been banned, usually by voter initiative. In California, for example, when voters outlawed racial preferences in college admissions and public contracting in 1996, the University of California system took a number of progressive steps to boost racial diversity indirectly—increasing the preference to economically disadvantaged students of all races, boosting financial aid packages, ending legacy preferences for the children of alumni, and making it easier for talented community college students to transfer to the UC system. Initially, UCLA and UC Berkeley saw declines in Black and Hispanic admissions, but in recent years, the race-neutral efforts have worked: In 2020 and 2021, the freshman classes at the two schools were the most ethnically diverse in decades. Both universities are also far more socioeconomically diverse than most other elite institutions.

Another encouraging example is the University of Texas at Austin. In the 1990s, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals barred public colleges in its jurisdiction from using race in its selection process. Republican and Democratic state legislators came together to create a policy to provide a boost to socioeconomically disadvantaged students and to admit the top 10 percent of students from every high school. The policy produced higher levels of Black and Hispanic representation than racial preferences previously had. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently gave universities the green light to use race, so Texas adopted a system in which 75 percent of students are admitted through the top 10 percent plan, and 25 percent through discretionary admissions that can include race as a factor. Mandery notes that the portion of the class admitted through the 10 percent plan has tripled the proportion of students from families earning less than $40,000, as the group admitted through discretionary admissions. 

While a place like Harvard can’t admit a national pool of applicants the same way, Mandery suggests, it could cast a wider net than it does now. He asks, “What if Harvard forsook its unspoken agreements with prep schools and instead said it was going to advantage high schools that reflected the diversity of their surrounding community?”

The evidence suggests that elite institutions will do what it takes to create racial diversity, with or without racial preferences. “Harvard repeats ‘diversity’ like a mantra,” Mandery writes. Going forward, elite colleges should follow California’s lead by jettisoning legacy preferences and giving a meaningful boost to working-class students to indirectly achieve racial diversity. And, as Mandery suggests, Congress should pass legislation to ensure that endowments are used to promote social mobility, not further entrench the wealthy.

Mandery notes that a slot at a top university can be “transformative.” It can put a low-income or working-class student on a completely different trajectory in life. Ironically, it might be the conservatives on the Supreme Court who provide the push for elite colleges to open the doors to working-class students—many of them Black and Hispanic—who have until now been mostly shut out.

The post Trust Fund U appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the 2020 presidential campaign, a relatively obscure Fair Housing Act regulation briefly took center stage. In an extended series of tweets, Donald Trump announced that he was repealing the 2015 Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule—which sought to promote residential desegregation—to protect “Suburban Housewives of America” from rising crime and plunging property values.

Playing on fears of low-income and Black people, Trump tweeted: “I am happy to inform all the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood …Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down.”

The Obama AFFH rule grew out of a long-neglected aspect of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. When legislators passed the law, they recognized that it was not enough to simply outlaw racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Given the federal government’s long history of creating segregated housing, and the entrenched nature of housing patterns, the law said that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should take affirmative steps to dismantle segregation.

The first prong of the Fair Housing Act—to outlaw prospective discrimination—has had some important successes. Studies find that housing discrimination has declined, and the segregation between Black and white families has fallen by about 25 percent since 1970. But segregation levels remain high, and the second prong of the Fair Housing Act—to take affirmative steps—was never really enforced by neither Republican or Democratic presidents until Barack Obama, toward the end of term, required that localities outline barriers to integration and generate plans with measurable goals to reduce segregation or risk losing federal housing dollars.

Trump’s demagogic scare tactics in 2020 were unsuccessful. Joe Biden actually picked up suburban votes compared with Hillary Clinton in 2016. But housing desegregation has always been a dicey political issue for progressives; senators such as Paul Douglas of Illinois and governors such as Pat Brown of California have lost their seats over the years for championing fair housing.

Moving forward, President Biden has announced his intent to revive the AFFH rule, but his administration is faced with a question of what form it should take. Housing desegregation is the great unfinished business of the civil rights movement, and goes to the heart of providing opportunity in America, so crafting a smart approach is crucial.

Fortunately for Biden, a quartet of researchers with affiliations to MIT—Justin P. Steil, Nicholas F. Kelly, Lawrence J. Vale and Maia S. Woluchem—have assembled an eclectic group of scholars to make important suggestions for a new and improved approach to desegregating housing. Their new volume, Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America’s Neighborhoods, provides a history of the Fair Housing Act and an insider’s account of battles within the Obama administration over the shaping of the AFFH rule. It also includes suggestions of how the rule could be improved. The volume, which includes contributions from both liberals and conservatives, offers a helpful primer for the new administration.

In one chapter, former Obama officials Raphael Bostic, Katherine O’Regan and Patrick Pontius note the contentious nature of the AFFH rule, not only between people of different ideological bents, but also within the progressive community. The rule-making process constituted what HUD officials dubbed “The Civil War Project” because it brought to the surface long-standing disputes between those progressives who push integration as the best path forward and those liberals who advocate investing more funds into creating educational and economic opportunities in high-poverty communities instead.

The AFFH Rule was crafted with the belief that while it is important to improve distressed neighborhoods, banking entirely on a “separate but equal” neighborhood strategy is unwise. Where you live in America determines access to good schools, safe neighborhoods, and job opportunities. As Harvard University’s Raj Chetty and colleagues have found, when children moved with their families to neighborhoods with less concentrated poverty before age 13 as part of a federal program, their mean income as adults was 31 percent higher than for the control group, which applied for the program but did not receive the opportunity. Likewise, research by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) scholar Richard Sander and colleagues has found that the Black-white gaps in unemployment, earnings, and mortality are much smaller in metropolitan areas that have lower levels of racial segregation than those with higher levels.

While opponents of the AFFH rule, such as Trump’s HUD Secretary Ben Carson, derided the policy as “social engineering,” in fact the framers of the Fair Housing Act recognized that action was required precisely because residential segregation was engineered by the government in the first place. As Harvard’s Alexander von Hoffman notes in his chapter on the history of the Fair Housing Act, government redlining of neighborhoods and enforcement of racially restrictive covenants help explain why the typical Black household saw its chances of having a non-Black neighbor decline from one in two in 1880 to one in three in 1940.

Shrewdly, the Obama AFFH rule stressed that the goal was not racial integration for integration’s sake, which raises objections from the left that the aim implicitly endorses a “celebration of Whiteness.” Rather, the objective was that all racial groups should have access to communities with good jobs and high-performing schools. A new AFFH rule should go further and include measures of access to safe neighborhoods, suggests Michael Lens, a professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UCLA. Lens cites extensive data suggesting that access to low-crime neighborhoods is a primary motivator for low-income families who move and that escaping high-crime neighborhoods increases educational outcomes for students.

But if Biden wants to improve opportunity, he needs to do more than reinstate an improved AFFH rule to address the legacy of past racial discrimination. He should also confront the rising problem of income discrimination by government that disproportionately hurts people of color. While racial segregation is slowly declining, income segregation has doubled since 1970. The Fair Housing Act outlaws discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability”—but it remains perfectly legal for municipalities to discriminate based on income, per se, by banning the construction of more affordable types of housing, such as duplexes, triplexes and apartments.

Indeed, some supporters of the 1968 Fair Housing Act actually pushed this limitation of the bill as a feature rather than a bug. The late Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA), for example, noted the bill would only allow “those who have resources” to escape the ghetto. As a result, upper-middle-class Black families, like the one Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) grew up in, were able to move to suburbs with strong public schools. But, Booker notes, many of his Black friends remained zoned out by class, rather than race.

For years, powerful Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) forces made reform of exclusionary zoning virtually impossible, but in recent years, coalitions of civil rights groups, labor unions, affordable housing advocates, and environmentalists have pushed back to legalize duplexes and triplexes in the entire city of Minneapolis and the state of Oregon, giving new hope that federal action too might be possible.

Indeed, Booker has teamed up with Congressman James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, to propose legislation to withhold federal funds from communities whose zoning laws discriminate by income, even if there is no disproportionate impact on minorities—a bill Biden has endorsed. And Biden’s infrastructure proposal includes a $5 billion race-to-the-top initiative to provide incentives for communities to reduce exclusionary zoning that discriminates by wealth.

Ultimately, America also needs an Economic Fair Housing Act, which would give individuals harmed by economically discriminatory policies the right to sue local governments in federal court, the way individuals can currently sue for racial discrimination. Such a law would mostly protect low-income people of color, but it would also benefit working-class whites, who are also excluded by government fiat from high-opportunity neighborhoods.

An Economic Fair Housing Act—coupled with a new and improved AFFH rule—would do a great deal to reduce racial, economic, and political divides that bedevil the country.

Furthering Fair Housing’s sound guidance should be read by all public officials seeking to navigate this difficult terrain.

The post The Limits of the Fair Housing Act appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In examining the 2016 populist revolt that gave rise to Donald Trump and Brexit, most observers have focused on two explanations. Some say the uprising was driven by economic dislocation: Voters were angry about rising inequality and felt they were losing out because of trade. Others argue that anger with the establishment stemmed from racist discomfort with immigration, demographic change, and growing religious diversity.

In his new book, the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel focuses on a third factor: elite smugness and self-dealing. To Sandel, 2016 represented a rebellion of voters lacking a college degree against a governing class that believes that its credentials, wealth, and power are the products of its merit. These leaders, Sandel argues, have condescended to blue-collar workers, “eroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered.” 

Sandel focuses primarily on the left. For three decades, he writes, leading Democrats—including Bill Clinton (Yale Law ’73), Hillary Clinton (Yale Law ’73), and Barack Obama (Harvard Law ’91)—embodied personally, and touted rhetorically, a brand of meritocracy hopelessly oblivious to what he calls the “tyranny of merit.” Sometimes, this is implicit, as when Pete Buttigieg flexes on his ability to speak eight languages and his experience as a Rhodes Scholar. Other times, it’s explicit. Speaking in Mumbai in 2018, Hillary Clinton bragged that she “won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product”—that is, the places that had been successful in the era of globalization. This, Sandel writes, “displayed the meritocratic hubris that contributed to her defeat.” The Democratic Party “once stood for farmers and working people against the privileged. Now, in a meritocratic age, its defeated standard bearer boasted that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country had voted for her.” 

Sandel isn’t opposed to a system of governance that prioritizes merit. He acknowledges the obvious benefits of meritocratic hiring over decisionmaking based on alternative reasoning, such as nepotism and racial or gender bias. And he knows that skills are important too. As a matter of efficiency, one wants a dentist who can repair a tooth competently. Moreover, after living through Donald Trump’s presidency, marked by shameless race baiting and bumbling incompetence in the face of a global pandemic, a nondiscriminatory meritocratic approach to leadership looks pretty good. 

But Sandel is right to probe the dark things that can come from embracing meritocracy. Liberals have been overemphasizing their credentials and the economic success of their cosmopolitan metropolises. In doing so, they’ve forgotten that these markers are not good indicators of worth. The ability to obtain post-secondary degrees, particularly from elite institutions, is at least as much a reflection of one’s class and race as it is of one’s deservedness. The wealth and success of more liberal places has as much to do with an unequal system that allows existing wealth to concentrate as it does with the merit of those cities. 

Most progressives (especially those conscious of race) know this. But at the same time, they are willing to accept meritocratic trappings—like college degrees—as accurate predictors of worth, enabling the rise of snobbery among the progressive professional class. It allows them to justify self-dealing policies that benefit themselves. It’s therefore no surprise that right-wing populism is on the rise.

The term meritocracy, almost universally praised today, was coined in the 1950s by the British sociologist Michael Young to describe a dystopia. In contrast to an aristocracy, where people on top know they are just lucky and people on the bottom know they are merely unfortunate, in a meritocracy a small minority of winners feel enormous pride in their accomplishments and the majority feel humiliated by their low position. Young’s book predicted a revolt against meritocratic elites in 2034. “In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule,” Sandel writes. 

It’s easy to see why. While meritocracy very appropriately denounces racism and sexism, it has given rise to what Sandel calls “the last acceptable prejudice,” a disdain for the less educated. Social scientists have found that highly educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” A 2018 study by five psychologists, for example, concluded that well-educated elites are no less biased than those with less education; “it is rather that [their] targets of prejudice are different.” Media scholars have noted that blue-collar fathers such as Homer Simpson are cast as “buffoons.” 

As a result, embracing meritocracy too tightly can be politically disastrous. In 2016, some working-class people were left with “the galling sense that those who stood astride the hierarchy of merit looked down with disdain on those they considered less accomplished than themselves.” The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, speaking at fund-raisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, labeled millions of working-class Americans as “deplorables.”

Sometimes, the meritocratic ethos can be well meaning but nevertheless counterproductive. At a 2017 conference I attended on civics education, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor took a series of questions from high school students, and before they each spoke, asked whether they intended to go to college. Each said yes, and she congratulated them all. In attendance was Clifford Janey, the former superintendent of public schools in Washington, D.C., who gently suggested to her during the Q&A that students who did not plan to go to college also had a lot to offer and were deserving of support. As Sandel notes, “Insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job” results in “prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college.”

Trump brilliantly exploited the idea that well-educated progressives looked down on those with less education (and, sometimes relatedly, those who are deeply religious). He rarely spoke of opportunity and upward mobility. A candidate “keenly alive to the politics of humiliation,” Sandel says, Trump feigned respect for working-class people. “l love the poorly educated,” Trump famously said after one primary victory. The gambit worked. Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won college-educated voters, but Trump won voters without a college degree—
a larger share of the electorate—by seven percentage points.

Liberals, of course, tend to have policies that are far more helpful to those without college educations than do conservatives. But Democratic governments stacked with well-educated elites have little real understanding of working-class struggles, and, just like Republicans, they can cause problems for the poor. For example, the mostly Ivy League status of Obama’s cabinet helped inform “a Wall Street–friendly response to the financial crisis,” Sandel writes, one that failed to comprehend “seething public anger.” Instead, the too-big-to-jail philosophy seemed to exonerate well-educated Wall Street bankers who engaged in selfish behavior that did grave damage to the country. Timothy Geithner and Rahm Emanuel were happier to bail out financial executives—who shared their pedigrees (and in some cases their former jobs)—than they were to rescue average Americans. In other words, a belief that wealth and education equal merit helped lead to stunning inequality.

Wealth and education obviously do not “naturally” equal merit. But even if we were able to eliminate the immense barriers of poverty, race, and gender—so that we had a society in which people could indeed rise as far as their talents would take them—meritocracy would remain problematic because it would still sometimes reward the merely lucky. The possession of raw talents is unearned. There is a large element of fortune in being born into a society at a time when your particular talents are valued. If LeBron James were a superb arm wrestler, rather than a phenomenal basketball player, he would not be making tens of millions of dollars, Sandel observes.

By failing to recognize these realities, today’s emphasis on creating a “true meritocracy” of talent, something the Democrats’ last two presidents explicitly advocated, allows meritocratic “winners to inhale too deeply of their success,” Sandel writes. It allows them to incorrectly conclude, “If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault.” 

What is to be done? Sandel wants to mend, not end, meritocracy. Merit should still play a “role in the allocation of jobs and social roles.” But we should be more forthright about acknowledging the role of luck. Americans should show more humility and, with it, strive for greater equality of condition as well as equality of opportunity. 

To do that, Sandel focuses his policy recommendation in two arenas: higher education and the workforce. He would increase funding for community colleges, which are grossly under-resourced. At selective colleges, he would find ways to boost economic diversity. Citing data showing that selective colleges have 23 times as many rich students as poor ones, he describes American higher education as “an elevator in a building that most people enter on the top floor.” Sandel would provide admissions preferences for low-income students and eliminate legacy preferences for the children of alumni. 

To make sure that Americans recognize the luck inherent in meritocracy, Sandel would admit all students to selective colleges by lottery once they reached a given academic threshold, with the option of giving extra lottery tickets to ensure diversity (all lottery participants, including those who came from groups eligible for extra tickets, would need to meet the same academic threshold). The lottery would make high school less oppressive for students seeking college admission, and would reduce the hubris of those admitted to college. In the Varsity Blues scandal, he notes, wealthy parents weren’t just trying to advance their children’s financial prospects. (They could have set up trust funds for that.) “They wanted something else—the meritocratic cachet that admission to elite colleges confers,” including the ability to look down on others.

Sandel’s other major focus is to find ways to honor “the dignity of work.” Work, he writes, is “both economic and cultural. It is a way of making a living and also a source of social recognition and esteem.” Progressives used to widely understand this. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. told striking sanitation workers that their labor was as important as a physician’s because if they didn’t do their job, disease would become rampant. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, running for president in 1968, likewise understood that joblessness was damaging not only because it meant a loss of income. Having a job, he declared, lets an individual “say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped build this country.’ ” Today, Sandel observes, few progressives speak that way. They instead mostly view individuals as “consumers” who want more income, rather than “producers” who want their contributions recognized. 

To reinforce the dignity of work, Sandel advocates reducing payroll taxes and increasing a tax on financial transactions. Oddly, however, he says almost nothing about the need to revive organized labor in America. Unions are the central instrument for ensuring that workers receive decent pay and benefits, avoid indignities like “just in time” scheduling, and are generally valued by employers and the public. 

It’s an unfortunate omission, given that unions have waned in the United States far more than in other countries facing similar globalization pressures. This decline is because U.S. laws have failed to recognize that labor organizing is a civil right. Employers routinely fire people for organizing a union because the penalties for doing so are extremely weak. To reverse this trend, Congress should extend the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which provides compensatory and punitive damages to victims of discrimination based on factors such as race and sex, to those fired for trying to create a union.

This reform, of course, will be impossible so long as Republicans hold the White House. But if Sandel is correct that Trump’s election was driven in part by an uprising against the tyranny of merit, it should spell good news for Joe Biden (Syracuse University Law ’68), who comes across as a bighearted politician who doesn’t look down on working-class people. Biden identifies King and RFK as his “two political heroes,” and echoes their rhetoric on the dignity of work and family and country. On the stump, Biden quotes his father, who once said, “Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect.” Biden has taken a strong stand against exclusionary zoning laws, which physically keep working-class people away from the wealthy. As we slowly emerge from a pandemic in which Americans have recognized grocery clerks, truck drivers, and paramedics as everyday heroes, one can hope that the country will—like Biden—embrace the dignity of these professions.

The post The Politics of Pretension appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Conservatives and moderates are often dismissive of “identity politics,” by which they mean liberal efforts to motivate voter turnout by raising issues of particular concern to women, people of color, and other marginalized groups in American politics. But it is important to remember that the original identity politics play was for whites. Long before women or people of color won the right to vote, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, a white supremacist, urged whites to rally around their racial identity. “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” he declared in an 1848 speech; “and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”

Calhoun was far from the last American conservative to encourage white working-class people to vote their race rather than their class. But no successful modern candidate has done so as blatantly as Donald Trump did in 2016. The timing thus could not be better for Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardina’s eye-opening book White Identity Politics, which uses extensive survey research to explore the meaning of white identity today.

Trump’s election sparked a furious debate on the left: Was his popularity among white voters due more to racism, or to so-called economic anxiety? Extensive polling showed that racial resentment correlated much more strongly with support for Trump than did economic factors. But could tens of millions of Trump voters really be out-and-out racists? 

Jardina helps make sense of these questions, in part by revealing that white voters can be motivated by favoritism toward their own group rather than hostility to others. Her central finding, based on polling, is that while 9 percent of whites are unabashed racists who hold favorable views of the Ku Klux Klan, a much larger group—between 30 and 40 percent of whites—feel a strong attachment to their whiteness. Whites who have high levels of white identity are not confined to the working class; they make up a “much wider swath of whites,” and, perhaps surprisingly, are more likely to be women than men.

The distinction between in-group love and out-group hate is helpful. One can strongly identify as Muslim or Christian, or Irish or Greek, without being hostile to people who practice a different faith or whose ancestors come from a different country. The problem is that, in America, an agenda based on white solidarity will in practice be hardly distinguishable from one driven by racial hatred, even if the motivation is less malicious. Protecting the status of white people, Jardina writes, ultimately means “preserving a system of inequality.” More broadly, in a democratic society, we do not want people to care only about their own kind; we hope that elderly people will care about the effects of global warming on the next generation, straight people will care about gay rights, and white people will care about racial justice.

What explains high levels of group identity and consciousness? “Threat to one’s group,” Jardina argues, “activates one’s group identity.” That is why, in a society where African Americans have had so much to fear, black racial identity is high. Between 69 and 85 percent of black people have high levels of racial identity, a much higher proportion than in any other racial group. By contrast, whites have been the economically dominant group throughout American history, and from 1790 to 1990 they constituted more than 80 percent of the population. As a result, they did not have to think about race in the way others did. But that is changing as the white share of the population declines. White people could shrink from the majority of Americans to a plurality within a generation or two.

Meanwhile, as the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has documented, many whites see efforts to help disadvantaged minorities as allowing nonwhite groups to “cut in line.” Perceived as unfair, affirmative action—as well as other government programs viewed, though often mistakenly, as providing targeted aid to minority groups—can trigger white identification. In surveys, three-quarters of whites say it is at least somewhat likely that “members of their racial group are denied jobs because employers are hiring minorities instead.” More than three-quarters also say it is at least somewhat important “for members of their group to work together in order to change laws unfair to whites.” 

The moral and historical case for affirmative action programs is powerful; racial preference programs should in no way be equated with antiblack discrimination. The fact remains, however, that the combination of rapid demographic change and programs that whites perceive as unfair provides a ripe political opportunity to today’s would-be John C. Calhouns. (It is no accident that California, one of the earliest states to become majority-minority, was the first to institute a ban on racial preferences.) Whites whose racial identity is strong, Jardina finds, are much more likely to support conservative policies (on issues such as immigration) and politicians (such as Donald Trump). 

These findings should be deeply troubling to liberals. Despite the pace of demographic change, whites still constituted 70 percent of the vote in 2016; predictions of Democratic hegemony built on a multiethnic coalition were wildly premature. Liberals thus have an urgent interest in countering the troubling rise in white racial identification. What, if anything, should they do differently? Four alternatives seem possible. First, liberals could educate whites about the roots of racial inequality and white privilege in hopes of changing their minds. Second, they could downplay racial justice issues. Third, they could try to achieve racial equality through race-neutral programs. Finally, they could champion an affirmative and inclusive American identity as an alternative to group-based identity. The first two ideas have serious flaws. But the latter two might work. 

You might think that educating whites about the reality of unearned privilege would make them less likely to identify proudly as white. But, as Jardina observes, the research suggests otherwise. Many whites already recognize that their skin color gives them privileges “and yet they express no interest in relinquishing it.” They are “glad to be white” and do not feel particularly ashamed about it.

The opposite approach would be to downplay racial issues. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon famously said of Democrats, “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” But even if Bannon were right, surrendering the fight for racial justice would come at an enormous moral cost. Policymakers urgently need to confront housing discrimination, voter suppression, school segregation, and racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. To ignore these issues would be to engage in the worst kind of white identity politics. 

When it comes to racial preferences, on the other hand, there are ways to shift course without giving up on the goal of racial equality. The key is to implement new class-based policies that disproportionately benefit people of color without explicitly taking race into account. This argument has distinguished roots. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that America should remedy its history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination through an inclusive Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged rather than a race-specific Negro Bill of Rights. Such an approach, he said, would disproportionately benefit black victims of discrimination, but “as a simple matter of justice” would also benefit poor whites. 

Empirical evidence has backed up King’s argument. In 2014, Anthony Carnevale, Stephen Rose, and Jeff Strohl of Georgetown University found that if the 193 most selective universities adopted a form of race-blind socioeconomic affirmative action, the combined African American and Hispanic representation would rise from 11 to 13 percent—withoutthe use of racial preferences. Meanwhile, socioeconomic diversity and mean SAT scores would also increase.

Finally, in order to reduce the pernicious phenomenon of white identity politics, liberals could try to supplant it by championing an inclusive American identity. As Jardina notes, the need to identify with a group—to have “a psychological, internalized sense of attachment”—is a deeply human impulse. Liberal politicians need to give voters, including white voters, a way to feel as though supporting them means supporting some group to which they feel a powerful allegiance. 

Liberals could nurture a new American patriotism by, for example, backing a public school curriculum that frankly acknowledges American mistakes but also emphasizes that the genius of democracy is that when there is free speech and the right to assemble, slavery gives way to the abolition movement, segregation to the civil rights movement, and the oppression of women to the feminist movement. A new national service program could also do much to build a national identity that brings young people of all backgrounds together to learn what they have in common as Americans.

According to Jardina, when asked what makes someone “truly American,” the vast majority of whites reject the idea that being white is important and instead suggest that the key ingredient is “to feel American,” whatever one’s race. Jardina further finds that “there are many white Americans who do not identify with their racial group but do identify strongly as American.” The challenge for today’s liberal politicians is to broaden that group.

This piece has been updated.

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Like the president he serves, Anthony Scaramucci, the flamboyant new White House communications director, likes to reference his Ivy League credentials. In a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Scaramucci was asked whether he would have attended a meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised to supply dirt on Hillary Clinton. While Donald Trump Jr. took the meeting, Scaramucci bragged that as a Harvard Law School graduate, he probably wouldn’t have gone himself. When asked about whether Trump could pardon himself, Scaramucci offered that he wasn’t sure, but he did get an A- in constitutional law from Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe.

What was the young Anthony Scaramucci like at Harvard Law School? And what might those early years tell us about President Trump’s new favorite aide, whose brash New York style is rightly earning Scaramucci the moniker, “mini-me”?

Scaramucci was in my first year section at Harvard Law School more than 30 years ago, and even then, he was known as a big personality. He was an exuberant figure who proposed to his girlfriend on a Times Square billboard. He made a brief appearance in a book I wrote called Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School. In the volume, I used the real names of professors—who were well known—but gave the young, non-famous students pseudonyms.  Anthony Scaramucci’s was Joe Sisorelli.

Scaramucci was a well-liked and high profile figure in the class of 1989. The son of working-class parents from Long Island, neither of whom were college graduates, Scaramucci enjoyed challenging Harvard’s pretensions.

In the second year, we had a tax professor who intimidated a lot of people, but not Scaramucci. When the professor asked him a tough question, Scaramucci said, “Well, I’d be glad to answer. But first, could you tell me where you got that great haircut?” The class burst into laughter and people swarmed Scaramucci afterward to congratulate him for taking the professor down a peg.

I don’t remember whether Scaramucci had already embraced right wing politics back at Harvard, but if he had, he was nevertheless a popular presence. He was a showman then, is a showman now, and he may just succeed in advancing Trump’s agenda.

In retrospect, though, there was another side to the gregarious and wise-cracking Scaramucci that was more unsettling. Many of us had come to law school hoping to be the next Thurgood Marshall advancing civil rights or Ralph Nader promoting consumer protection. Two-thirds of us entered law school saying we wanted careers in public interest law, but most of us instead became corporate lawyers. Referencing the then-popular TV show, “LA Law,” I wrote: “A number of students come wanting to be Atticus Finch and leave as Arnie Becker.” If most of us sold out, we nevertheless agonized over the decision of what type of law to practice.

Scaramucci, however, skipped law altogether and went straight to investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He would later go on to found a group of global hedge funds known as SkyBridge Capital.

Looking back at our class of 1989 yearbook, I was struck by something Scaramucci’s parents wrote in a section of the volume where family members could wish their loved ones congratulations.

The note read: “To Anthony with love, pride and congratulations. ‘To the victor go the spoils.’ Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Scaramucci.”

On one level, this sentiment was understandable. The son of a construction worker had risen to graduate from Harvard Law School, an enormous accomplishment. But the parental advice was not a lofty “give back to your community,” or “to whom much is given, much is expected” or “promote justice in the legal profession.” It suggested that having advanced in America’s meritocratic race, it was time to cash in.

Like the president whom Scaramucci would go on to serve, getting rich was the goal, and winning was everything. In some ways, Scaramucci is a funnier and smarter version of his boss. And if Scaramucci’s early days are any indication, his charm may well be effective in carrying out their shared conception of success—uninspiring and shallow as that vision may be.

The post I Went to Harvard Law with Anthony Scaramucci. Here’s What He Was Like. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The major unfinished business of the civil rights movement, writes Richard Rothstein in his powerful new book, The Color of Law, is housing. Over the past fifty years, we’ve made considerable progress reducing discrimination in restaurants, hotels, transportation, voting, and employment, he writes, but residential segregation remains relatively high.

A half century after the Kerner Commission found that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” African Americans are much more likely than whites of similar incomes to live in poor neighborhoods. This is tragic, Rothstein notes, because where you live implicates so much else in life—access to good schools, transportation, employment, and wealth.

Why have we made so much less progress on housing than on other frontiers of the civil rights movement? Perhaps biased whites don’t want to live in neighborhoods where black representation rises above a modest threshold, while middle-class blacks have an understandable desire to be where they are not a small minority and don’t have to face discrimination from whites.

But these phenomena are rooted in something deeper, Rothstein suggests: a powerful legacy of deliberate government action that has still not been remedied. Much of what we call de facto segregation, he argues, is the result of “a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state and local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate.” The inheritance today is continued racial distrust.

Rothstein, a research associate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and former education columnist for the New York Times, has produced a searing indictment of racially segregating policies, enacted, as he notes, by otherwise liberal presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. While not groundbreaking for experts familiar with this history, The Color of Law is a story particularly well told and should help educate a younger generation of Americans. (Disclosure: I have known Rothstein casually for almost two decades, and he contributed a chapter to a book I edited on educational inequality in 2000.)

Residential areas were comparatively integrated in the nineteenth century, Rothstein says, until a set of deliberate acts to segregate began in earnest in the early twentieth. In 1910, Baltimore pioneered racial zoning by prohibiting blacks from buying in majority-white areas, or whites in majority-black areas. Such policies were struck down by a 1917 U.S. Supreme Court decision, so communities switched to economic zoning, such as requiring that neighborhoods consist exclusively of single-family homes or have minimum lot sizes. Because African Americans were (and are) disproportionately low income, economically exclusionary zoning accomplished much of the same end result.

But segregationists also needed new ways to keep middle-class African Americans out of white neighborhoods, so many homeowners adopted racially restrictive covenants, which required purchasers to agree not to sell to blacks alongside other “undesirable” uses of the property. One such provision forbade selling the home to someone who would construct “any slaughter house, smith shop, forge furnace,” or “for any structure other than a dwelling of people of the Caucasian race.” These provisions were initially upheld in the courts on the theory that the covenants were private contracts and not subject to the Constitution.

That was a lie, of course, because contracts don’t have force without the power of the state, and in city after city, courts and sheriffs evicted African Americans from homes they had rightly paid for to enforce racially restrictive covenants. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, the federal government further deepened segregation as the newly created Federal Housing Administration, which was designed to increase homeownership by guaranteeing mortgages, instructed appraisers to focus on all-white communities. An FHA manual suggested that the best financial bets were those in which there were safeguards, such as highways separating communities to prevent “the infiltration of  lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.” In 1940, the FHA actually denied insurance for a white development located near an African American community until the builder agreed to construct a concrete wall, a half-mile long and six feet high, to separate the two neighborhoods.

In 1948, civil rights activists won a victory when the Supreme Court reversed its earlier ruling and unanimously struck down racially restrictive covenants as a violation of the Constitution. Even then, white mobs routinely harassed black families moving into white communities, subjecting them to violence as police stood by. Not until 1968 did the Fair Housing Act outlaw racial discrimination in housing and make violence to prevent integration a federal crime.

Rothstein toiled on this book for a decade, and the hard work shows. The research is exhaustive, the prose is powerful and direct, and the blending of individual stories and larger trends is masterful. The greatest strength of the book is that Rothstein has brought to twenty-first-century readers a powerful exposé that musters the moral outrage that accompanied the devastating indictment in the 1967 Kerner Commission report.

And yet, the similarity to the Kerner report also constitutes the book’s greatest weakness. The world has changed profoundly in the last fifty years, and those changes are not fully reflected in Rothstein’s work. He writes again and again about “black” and “white,” as if we had not seen a massive influx of Latino immigrants, who face their own discrimination in America. Rothstein relegates discussion of Latinos to a “frequently asked questions” section at the end of the book, where he dismissively suggests that “few have been ‘segregated.’ ” (Rothstein rejects the term “people of color” for that reason.) But in 2010 researchers found that the typical African American and the typical Hispanic both lived in neighborhoods that were 35 percent white.

Rothstein also mostly ignores critical trends in racial and income segregation by residence since 1970. The black/white dissimilarity index (in which 0 is perfect integration, and 100 is absolute segregation) declined from 79 in 1970 to 59 in 2010. But as Harvard’s Robert Putnam has noted, “while race-based segregation has been slowly declining,” we have seen the rise of “a kind of incipient class apartheid” as income segregation has risen significantly.

Part of the story, as William Julius Wilson of Harvard has documented, is that civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act, reduced discrimination against middle- and upper-class African Americans who could afford to move out of ghettos. Today, Wilson notes, income inequality within the African American community is larger than within the white community. Left behind are a truly disadvantaged group of African Americans who live in highly concentrated poverty.

Although racially restrictive covenants and racial zoning laws are, thankfully, illegal, class-based zoning is widespread. As Rothstein notes, zoning laws such as those excluding apartments or houses on modest lot sizes were upheld in a 1926 Supreme Court decision that, tellingly, likened an apartment house to “a parasite,” akin to “a nuisance.” Just as racial segregation is not just the natural reflection of individual choices, so too, our rising economic segregation is not just the result of market forces but is shaped by government regulations that exclude.

Nevertheless, when it comes to remedies, Rothstein’s first instinct is to propose race-based policies, including those specifically aimed at helping more privileged African Americans. He suggests that the federal government purchase the next 15 percent of houses in what have been all-white communities like Levittown, New York, and sell them to African Americans at roughly 20 percent of the current market value to approximate what their grandparents would have paid for the properties had they not been discriminated against. He also suggests a federal financial subsidy to support middle-class African Americans moving into racially exclusive suburbs.

To his credit, Rothstein acknowledges that these ideas are “politically and judicially inconceivable” and quickly pivots to class-based remedies that are much more legally sustainable, and, as a matter of politics, could theoretically unite the interests of working-class communities of color who supported Hillary Clinton and working-class whites who favored Donald Trump.

Rothstein calls for an elimination of class-based zoning, or at least reducing the mortgage interest deduction in jurisdictions that don’t accommodate their fair share of low-income and moderate-income housing. These are unlikely to be enacted at the federal level, but, as Rothstein notes, progressive jurisdictions from New Jersey to Massachusetts are leaders in limiting exclusionary zoning. He also supports inclusionary zoning laws, like those used in Montgomery County, Maryland, that set aside a proportion of new development units for families of modest means. There are interesting alliances to be made between civil rights groups, libertarians who oppose government regulations, and certain developers, who all chafe at exclusionary zoning laws.

As we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act next year, addressing exclusionary zoning could begin to remedy the growing spatial divide by class that disproportionately affects African Americans and continues to prevent racial reconciliation. Rothstein’s provocative book lays the moral groundwork for a strong government role in undoing the harm that government helped to create in the first place.

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