This event is hosted by Silicon Valley at Home (SV@Home) and the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County (HLC) as part of Affordable Housing Month 2021.
Silicon Valley at Home (SV@Home) and the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County (HLC) are excited to present a special Affordable Housing Month lecture by Richard Rothstein, author of the acclaimed book, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” The first 80+ attendees of this virtual event will receive a copy of the book.
There is a national myth that residential segregation is de facto—the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. “The Color of Law” demonstrates, however, that residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-twentieth century that openly subsidized whites-only suburbanization in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the U.S. and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems – it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. Only after learning the history of this policy can we be prepared to undertake the national conversation necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.
Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and of the Haas Institute at the University of California. In addition, Rothstein is the author of many other articles and books on race and education. Learn more about him, his research, and his writing here.