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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Rothstein say black families were unprepared to do as a consequence of purchasing from blockbusters?

2. Who does Rothstein say was the only one who had standing to enforce a racially restrictive covenant?

3. Where did the U.S. Housing Authority encourage whites to move?

4. What was demolished to make way for the first PWA development?

5. What was the first city in which whites concentrated blacks in neighborhoods based on race?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Rothstein identify as the force that made blockbusting possible?

2. Why does Rothstein say that Robert Mereday did not even bother filing an application for a mortgage?

3. What does Rothstein say the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded about the American government’s role in creating segregation?

4. How does Rothstein say blacks were prevented from voting in South Carolina in 1876?

5. How was housing policy affected by the 1968 Jones decision?

6. How does Rothstein circumvent the argument that racially restrictive covenants and exclusionary zoning ordinances were private agreements?

7. How does Rothstein say UCLA students in Westwood, near Los Angeles, got around their neighborhood’s racially restrictive covenants?

8. How does Rothstein say deeds were used as mechanisms of segregation, and how does he say they were backed as de jure segregation?

9. When black families could end up getting mortgages, how does Rothstein say those mortgages affected them?

10. Why did Roosevelt’s New Deal leave African Americans behind, according to Rothstein?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

Essay Topic 2

In a few places, Rothstein mentions prohibitions including not only African Americans but poor people and the Irish or other so-called undesirable groups of people. America also has a history of playing low-income people of different races against each other, in order to distract from the power of powerful men to exploit markets and workers. What would Rothstein’s book look like if it focused on class, in addition to race, to expose the degree to which it was not just whites who pushed for powerful segregation policies, but powerful whites, who used their authority against other white people to profit off of segregation? Where is the profit motive in segregation? How does our view of segregation change if we look at it as a phenomenon driven by economic class?

Essay Topic 3

Would you recommend The Color of Law? For what purposes would you recommend The Color of Law, and what kinds of readers would you recommend it for? What other book would you recommend that would cover the same material or tell the same story in a different way?

(see the answer keys)

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