Fair Housing Book Recommendations

The Color of Law

A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
By Richard Rothstein

One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2017
Longlisted for the National Book Award

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided solely through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

This title is available as an audiobook for NAR members as part of the NAR online library (NAR Member ID required). It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• Publisher’s Discussion Questions
• Segregated by Design – A 17 minute video exploring the book
• “A Powerful, Disturbing History of Residential Segregation in America” – New York Times  book review

Sundown Towns

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
By James W. Loewen

“Powerful and important . . . an instant classic.”

—The Washington Post Book World

The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author.

In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.

This title is available as an ebook for NAR members as part of the NAR online library (NAR Member ID required). It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• Author James W. Loewen discusses the book on C-SPAN ()
• “As the first comprehensive history of sundown towns ever written, this book is sure to become a landmark in several fields” – Publishers Weekly starred review
• “Methodically upends many of white America’s preconceived notions about race” – The Chicago Reader review

Family Properties

Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
by Beryl Satter

Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago — and cities across the nation.

The real estate industry has helped Americans of every background build wealth through homeownership. For much of the 20thcentury, however – and arguably to the present — African Americans have been excluded from these opportunities to build intergenerational wealth. Instead, many Black Americans were subjected to predatory practices that drained billions of dollars from their families and communities.

Historian Beryl Satter explains how this exploitation played out in mid-twentieth century Chicago through the story of her father, Mark J. Satter, a Jewish attorney who both owned rental properties and defended Black clients who were targeted by unscrupulous real estate operators.

This title is available as an ebook for NAR members as part of the NAR online library (NAR Member ID required). It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• Author Beryl Satter discusses the book on C-SPAN
• “Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book” – “The Ghetto Is Public Policy” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic
  • “This is rich material... Satter balances personal stories, including moments of great bravery, with painstaking legal and historical research.” – The New York Times review

Levittown

Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb
by David Kushner

The dark side of the American dream: the true story of the first African-American family to move into the iconic suburb, Levittown, PA.

In the decade after World War II, one entrepreneurial family helped thousands of people buy into the American dream of owning a home. The Levitts—William, Alfred, and their father, Abe—pooled their talents to create storybook towns with affordable little houses. They laid out the welcome mat, but not to everyone. Levittown had a whites-only policy.

Find this book at your local library. It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• “In an entertaining round-robin format, Kushner relays each party’s story in the leadup to a combustible summer when the integration of America’s most famous suburb caused the downfall of a titan and transformed the nation” – Publishers Weeky review
• “Kushner expertly recounts the events and places them in a broader historical context” – Jewish Book Council review

Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

This title is available as an ebook for NAR members as part of the NAR online library (NAR Member ID required). It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• Author Isabel Wilkerson discusses the book on C-SPAN
• “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing – a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis” – NPR review
• “A consummate storyteller, Wilkerson chooses her anecdotes to illustrate caste’s enduring logic, from humiliation and prejudice to spectacular violence” – Los Angeles Review of Books review

The Sum of Us

What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
by Heather McGhee

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color.

Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?

This title is available as an ebook for NAR members as part of the NAR online library (NAR Member ID required). It is also available on the publisher's website, and on Amazon.com.

Tools and Resources for Readers

• Author Heather McGhee discusses the book on C-SPAN
• Heather McGhee discusses the economic costs of racism on CBS Mornings
• “Political commentator McGhee argues in her astute and persuasive debut that income inequality and the decline of the middle and working classes in America are a direct result of the country’s long history of racial injustice” – Publishers Weekly review