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

many low-income Hispanic youth living in neighborhoods of concentrated
disadvantage have a toxic relationship with police that is similar to that of
African American youth, and for many of the same reasons.
Yet horrific though our treatment of Mexican immigrants and Puerto
Ricans has sometimes been, it is not comparable to our treatment of African
Americans. In many communities, restrictive covenants prohibited sales not
only to African Americans but also to Hispanics (and frequently to Jews, the
Irish, Asians, and others deemed “non-Caucasians”). Yet judges often
deemed Mexican Americans to be “Caucasians” and not subject to exclusion
by restrictive covenants. As the twentieth century progressed, property and
residency restrictions mostly faded away for all except African Americans.
Only African Americans have been systematically and unconstitutionally
segregated for such a long period, and with such thorough repression, that
their condition requires an aggressive constitutional remedy.
Certainly, Hispanics still suffer discrimination, some of it severe.
Bilingual education programs smooth the transition to English for lowincome
immigrant children, but nativist-driven campaigns have severely
restricted the use of this proven pedagogy. Nearly one in four Hispanics
seeking to buy or rent homes still meet with discrimination from real estate
agents or landlords. In some cases, municipal officials target Hispanic
immigrant households for selective building code enforcement. Under the
eye of regulators, banks discriminatorily marketed subprime loans to
Hispanic as well as to African American families.
Although in many respects the experience of low-income immigrant
Hispanics is similar to that of earlier European immigrant groups, those
groups experienced periods of broadly shared prosperity. After European
immigrants, or their descendants, returned as veterans from World War II,
production and nonsupervisory workers experienced a quarter-century of
wage growth that averaged 2.3 percent a year, helping them to establish firm
footings in the American middle class. Since 1973, there has been no wage
growth whatsoever for production and nonsupervisory workers. This trend,
not unremedied de jure segregation, is what may prevent late twentiethcentury
immigrants from fully following in the path of those who came
before.
In metropolitan areas, many first- and second-generation Hispanics live in
neighborhoods with high proportions of poor and low-income families.