Racial Equity and Urban Climate Action

Government has long been complicit in creating our nation’s structural racism.

The nation was founded with slavery enforced by the state, and southern states continued to enforce Jim Crow even after Emancipation. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein definitively establishes that the U.S. government spread segregation to the North as the price of southern support for the New Deal. Federal and state governments colluded with developers and brokers to limit access of aspiring Black homeowners to white neighborhoods, resulting in government-created ghettoes. To this day, police violence is disproportionately directed against people of color, most recently in the George Floyd murder by Minneapolis police.

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