The Haas Institute at UC Berkeley is thrilled to announce that Senior Fellow Richard Rothstein has been named the winner of the 2018 Prize for Book Journalism in Service of the Common Good from the Sidney Hillman Foundation. The prize was awarded to Rothstein for his groundbreaking book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America published in May 2017.
Rothstein, who holds appointments at the Haas Institute, Economic Policy Institute, and at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is a nationally-renowned scholar of segregation in the United States, particularly when looked through the structural lenses of education and housing. His book The Color of Law, rigorously dismantles the myth that segregation in US cities is the result of individual people and their individual prejudices. Through careful historical documentation, Rothstein demonstrates that laws and policies at the local, state, and federal levels intentionally and systematically created the racialized geographic boundaries US cities still exemplify today.
“Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that relearning this history is a necessary step because it is the foundation for understanding that aggressive policies are in order to desegregate these urban areas and finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past,” the Sidney Hillman Foundation wrote in its announcement.
According to the announcement, the Hillman prizes “recognize journalists who serve the public interest and come at a time when the media is under fire from all sides, including attempts by the White House to smear reporters with charges of ‘fake news’ and the hollowing out of the infrastructure that once supported investigative and local reporting.” The awards were judged this year by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, Reuters’ Alix Freedman, The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel.
The Color of Law was previously named as one of ten finalists on the National Book Awards' long list for the best nonfiction book of 2017.
