Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The majority African-American enclaves found in every major US city are no accident of history. And, although societal racism certainly played its part, de facto segregation isn’t the prime culprit for the urban divide. In this animation, adapted from his book The Color of Law (2017), the US historian Richard Rothstein explains with devastating precision how decades of brazenly intentional racist local, state and federal government housing policies led to the current status quo. While this history was once widely understood, the extent of these efforts – including their origins in Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal public housing initiatives – have been forgotten, even as their lasting effects are omnipresent. In reviving this history, Rothstein details the multitude of ways these policies are still affecting African-American communities, and offers a remedy for the generations of harm. He argues that state-sponsored segregation efforts were unconstitutional at their very inception, and must be reckoned with both in the courts and with new policy that acknowledges the pernicious legacy of housing discrimination in the US.
video
Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
8 minutes
video
Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
15 minutes
video
The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
video
Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
8 minutes
video
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes
video
History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
video
Human rights and justice
Thirty years after one teenager shot another, is it time to forgive?
28 minutes
video
Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
video
Demography and migration
How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers
27 minutes