Among Rothstein’s more telling examples is Stuyvesant Town, a 9,000-apartment complex built on Manhattan’s East Side in the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The process of construction began with the city condemning 18 square blocks of a racially integrated neighborhood and transferring the land to the company, which received tax relief as well. Met Life executives made it clear that Stuyvesant Town was for “white people only” — a policy that led to protests and a compromise whereby the company agreed to lease a handful of apartments to “qualified Negro tenants,” while building a “smaller development” for black renters in Harlem. By this point, however, Stuyvesant Town was almost fully leased. Blacks were shut out, and would remain so, because New York City’s rent control laws kept turnover low for the original white tenants and their “lawful successors,” while rapidly rising rents for its vacated apartments made the development unaffordable for even middle-class families. Today, African-Americans constitute a minuscule part of Stuyvesant Town, which sits in one of Manhattan’s most famously “progressive” districts. (Donald Trump received a paltry 15 percent of the vote there in the recent presidential election.)

What are the remedies? Here, Rothstein has less to add. A number of his pet ideas have no hope of gaining public acceptance, he readily admits, like withholding mortgage interest and property tax deductions from those living in neighborhoods that actively exclude blacks and the poor, or having the federal government buy a percentage of the houses that come up for sale in Levittown, which would then be resold to African-American buyers for $75,000 — far below their current market value but equal, in today’s dollars, to the original asking price of $7,990. Sadly, there is no easy fix. Though many states place restrictions of some sort on “exclusionary zoning,” a few have gone further to mandate “fair share” requirements for low- and moderate-income suburban housing, with incentives both for developers and local communities — a plan Rothstein favors.

As a call to arms, “The Color of Law” may be difficult for potential allies to embrace. Interracial alliances break down, Rothstein insists, “when whites develop overly intolerant judgments of the unfortunate — from a need to justify their own acceptance of segregation that so obviously conflicts with both their civic ideals and their religious ones.” Supposedly blinded by bigotry or ignorance, they refuse to acknowledge what Rothstein seems to see as self-evident: that the myriad social problems plaguing the inner cities today arise from race discrimination, and race discrimination alone. To dare to challenge this — to speak of individual agency, for example — is akin to flogging the victim. End of discussion.

Rothstein, moreover, rejects the phrase “people of color,” because it lumps African-Americans with groups that didn’t suffer as systematically at government hands — like Asians and Hispanics. (First- and second-generation Mexicans live in segregated neighborhoods by choice, we are assured, not because they are forced to.) While the history of African-Americans is undoubtedly unique, ranking groups by the discrimination they endured may not be the most productive way to proceed.

In his preface, Rothstein writes that America has a constitutional obligation to remedy de jure segregation in housing, and that its story must be told. While the road forward is far from clear, there is no better history of this troubled journey than “The Color of Law.”