The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

Of course, no presently constituted Congress would adopt such a policy
and no presently constituted court would uphold it. Taxpayers would rebel at
the cost, as well as at the perceived undeserved gift to African Americans. I
present this not as a practical proposal but only to illustrate the kind of
remedy that we would consider and debate if we disabused ourselves of the
de facto segregation myth.
VII
THE SEGREGATION we should remedy is not only that of low-income families
but that of middle-class African Americans who currently reside in towns
like Lakeview, where Vince Mereday settled and which is still today 85
percent African American; or Roosevelt, Long Island (currently 79 percent
African American), another predominantly black middle-class town near
where other Mereday relatives found homes; or Prince George’s County (65
percent African American) outside Washington, D.C.; or Calumet Heights
(93 percent African American) outside Chicago.
Middle-class suburbs like these are attractive to many African Americans,
and no policy should force them to integrate against their will. But we
should provide incentives for integration because these suburbs have
disadvantages for their residents and for the rest of us. The most important
disadvantage is that they are frequently adjacent to low-income
communities. About one-third of middle- and upper-income black families
now live in neighborhoods bordering severely disadvantaged areas, while
only 6 percent of income-similar white families do so. Black middle-class
adolescents living in such close proximity to ghettos must resist the lure of
gangs and of alienated behavior if they aspire to duplicate their parents’
middle-class status. Even if they avoid such a trap, youth growing up in
predominantly African American communities, even middle-class ones, will
gain no experience mastering a predominantly white professional culture in
which they, as adults, will want to succeed.
Federal subsidies for middle-class African Americans to purchase homes
in suburbs that have been racially exclusive are the most obvious incentive