Richard Rothstein

Senior Fellow

EMAIL

rrothstein@epi.org

Areas of Expertise

Richard Rothstein is a Senior Fellow at the Othering & Belonging Institute, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute where he works on policy issues regarding education and race, and a senior fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is also the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. Rothstein was a senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at Berkeley’s law school, until that institute closed at the end of 2015.

NEWS

Black protesters in the 1960s calling for fair housing
Podcast: Trump attacks fair housing: What does the end of AFFH spell for integration?
Last week Trump announced he had eliminated an Obama-era fair housing rule put in place in 2015 to reverse patterns of residential segregation that have been in place for many decades. The move was widely seen as both an attack on integration and also a racial fear mongering strategy to appeal to...
Interview
cover of the law journal article
Putting Integration on the Agenda
On October 18, 2019, Stephen Menendian and Richard Rothstein published a review of a landmark new book on racial residential segregation in the United States, examining the policy options to advance the goal of integration. Published in the American Bar Association's Journal of Affordable Housing...
Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50 conference
This page and all related pages in the navigation menu serve as an archive of the "Race & Inequality in America: The Kerner Commission at 50 conference." Excerpts of media coverage of the conference are here . And check out our Twitter Moment recapping the conference with a lot of pictures here...
Event Recap
Segregation Was No Accident
This piece was originally published in the 2017 Haas Institute newsletter . An interview with Richard Rothstein on how the US government enacted policies to produce and maintain segregation—and the effects of these policies today. Rothstein was recently nominated for the National Book Award for his...
Interview

REPORTS

road not taken cover image
The Road Not Taken
Download this report here . Read the press release here . In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a bipartisan commission and charged it with analyzing the underlying causes and conditions that led to over 150 race-related riots during that summer. The Kerner Commission sent field teams to...
Publication
cover of the law journal article
Putting Integration on the Agenda
On October 18, 2019, Stephen Menendian and Richard Rothstein published a review of a landmark new book on racial residential segregation in the United States, examining the policy options to advance the goal of integration. Published in the American Bar Association's Journal of Affordable Housing...
Publication
Mount Holly Amicus Brief Cover
Amicus Brief for Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc.
October 30, 2013 This nation’s commitment to fair housing and integrated living patterns is in peril in a critical case reviewed by the United States Supreme Court this term. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, was enacted only after the assassination of Martin Luther King...
Publication

BLOG POST

Kerner preview
Blog: The road not taken: Housing and criminal justice 50 years after the Kerner Commission report
| August 09, 2019
August 7, 2019 By Stephen Menendian and Richard Rothstein Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the “Kerner Commission” report , the Economic Policy Institute, collaborating with the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins...
BLOG
Segregated Neighborhoods image, Chris Jones, CC Licence via Flickr
Blog: We can’t meaningfully integrate schools without desegregating neighborhoods
Richard Rothstein | December 15, 2016
December 15, 2016 By Richard Rothstein A bill introduced in the New York City Council proposes to establish “an office of school diversity within the human rights commission dedicated to studying the prevalence and causes of racial segregation in public schools and developing recommendations for...
BLOG
Ben Carson, Wikicommons license, Photo by Gage Skidmore
What Ben Carson Should Learn about Housing Segregation
Richard Rothstein | December 05, 2016
December 5, 2012 President-elect Donald Trump proposes to nominate Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mr. Carson has expressed opposition to the Obama administration’s new requirement that cities and suburbs develop plans to end their segregation or face...
BLOG
Classroom Chairs, Malate269 / Wikimedia Commons
GAO Report on Segregation Misses the Bigger Picture
Richard Rothstein | May 23, 2016
This was originally published on the Economic Policy Institute's blog. Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a misleading report on school segregation , which I discussed with NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill and others on the Diane Rehm Show . The takeaway...
BLOG
Houses in a row. Photo by flickr user Pedro Tavares Silva/Creative Commons license.
Housing Segregation Undergirds the Nation’s Racial Inequities
Richard Rothstein | May 09, 2016
This was originally posted on the Economic Policy Institute blog. In June, the Supreme Court rescued the Fair Housing Act from a claim that it prohibited only overt discrimination—where a government body announces that it is enacting a housing policy for racially discriminatory reasons. Instead,...
BLOG

MEDIA

August 18, 2017: How Does Segregation Affect Your Health? It Has A Huge & Surprising Impact (Bustle)

July 24, 2017: State-Enforced Segregation and the Color of Justice (The American Prospect)

June 20, 2017: A Powerful, Disturbing History of Residential Segregation in America (The New York Times)

May 30, 2017: The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental (Smithsonian Magazine)

May 18, 2017: Interview: Richard Rothstein on his important, new book ‘The Color of Law’ (The Washington Post)

May 17, 2017: 'The Color Of Law' Details How U.S. Housing Policies Created Segregation (NPR)

May 5, 2017: Discrimination Is Not De Facto (Slate)

Apr. 15, 2016: How Princeton’s trustees ducked the most important issue raised by student protesters (The Washington Post)

Apr. 14, 2016: On renaming the Woodrow Wilson School: The standards of his time, and ours (Economic Policy Institute)