Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein is an American policy researcher and author known for his work on race, education and housing. He is a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Earlier in his career, he wrote about education for The New York Times.

His nonfiction joins historical evidence to policy analysis. In Class and Schools, he examined how economic and social conditions shape the Black-white achievement gap. Grading Education considered how schools should be assessed. His later work turned more directly to residential segregation and its consequences.

The Color of Law is his best-known book. It traces how federal, state and local authorities used public housing, racial zoning, mortgage policy and other measures to create and preserve segregated neighborhoods. The book was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction and received the 2018 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. Rothstein later co-wrote Just Action with Leah Rothstein, shifting the discussion toward practical efforts to challenge entrenched segregation.

New readers should begin with The Color of Law. It is the clearest introduction to Rothstein’s central argument: that American residential segregation was produced not simply by private prejudice or personal choice, but through deliberate government action. Its movement between national policy and specific communities makes a complex legal and economic history concrete.