The Color of Law

For all of us who try to cleanse our collective conscience by minimizing our past actions and relegating them to selected actions of bigots who exist on the fringe of our culture, this book is for you. Rothstein gives ample evidence that the racism of our country is explicit, ubiquitous, and codified at every level of our country.
Part of our problem is that we have never used the right terms to describe our racism. Rothstein differentiates between de facto racism (that which simply describes the facts as they were) and de jure racism (that which is undergirded by law). His evidence is overwhelming and makes this a hard book to read. If right, I think he is, then the right word to describe our racist history is apartheid. But in our “exceptionalism” we restrict that term to other countries. The reality is that it describes the USA.
We continue apartheid when we see that the racism in our country is de jure, but offer no remedy.