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Latin for “by fact,” describing something that exists but without sanction by law. This contrasts with things that are de jure, meaning created “by law.” The vast majority of Americans, from high school students to Supreme Court justices, assume that residential segregation in the United States is de facto, not de jure: they think that white people have simply chosen to live in some places and black people in others. This, Rothstein argues, is because they do not know the history of housing in the United States: in reality, the government spent endless time and resources deliberately segregating every major city in the United States over more than a century, with cooperation from banks, nonprofit organizations, police departments, corporations, labor unions, and much of the judicial system. Accordingly, Rothstein’s main argument in The Color of Law is that American residential segregation is de jure, not de facto.
De Facto Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by De Facto or refer to De Facto. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Preface
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De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and “white flight” followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with “redlining,” refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven’t generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.
All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. […] Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
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By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it. If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill.
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Half a century ago, the truth of de jure segregation was well known, but since then we have suppressed our historical memory and soothed ourselves into believing that it all happened by accident or by misguided private prejudice. Popularized by Supreme Court majorities from the 1970s to the present, the de facto segregation myth has now been adopted by conventional opinion, liberal and conservative alike.
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Chapter 12
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I hesitate to offer suggestions about desegregation policies and remedies because, imprecise and incomplete though they may be, remedies are inconceivable as long as citizens, whatever their political views, continue to accept the myth of de facto segregation. If segregation was created by accident or by undefined private prejudices, it is too easy to believe that it can only be reversed by accident or, in some mysterious way, by changes in people’s hearts. But if we—the public and policy makers—acknowledge that the federal, state, and local governments segregated our metropolitan areas, we may open our minds to considering how those same federal, state, and local governments might adopt equally aggressive policies to desegregate.
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“In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.”
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With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?
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De Facto Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term De Facto appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface
...by government at all levels. Racial segregation in the United States is de jure, not de facto .
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Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
Rothstein begins by noting that Americans often see segregation as the de facto result of generally poorer black families being unable to buy houses in more expensive, whiter...
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Chapter 12: Considering Fixes
...such policy will ever pass so long as people “continue to accept the myth of de facto segregation.”
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...segregation or the discrimination written into the New Deal, and one falsely calls segregation “ de facto ” and blames it on “unwritten custom or tradition.” It makes sense that everyone believes...
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...be constitutional, legal, and correct—but impossible to do now, since most Americans believe in “the de facto segregation myth.”
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Epilogue
...Rothstein chalks America’s inaction on segregation up to the nation’s “comfortable delusion” that segregation is de facto , which is “the easiest” course of action. Certainly, de facto racist views have worsened...
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