Segregated By Design: An Animated Look at How African-American Enclaves in U.S. Cities Is Hardly an Accident

From his­to­ri­an Richard Roth­stein comes a sober­ing ani­mat­ed video called “Seg­re­gat­ed by Design.”  Author of the 2017 book The Col­or of Law: A For­got­ten His­to­ry of How Our Gov­ern­ment Seg­re­gat­ed Amer­i­ca, Roth­stein has cre­at­ed a video that’s as infor­ma­tive as it is visu­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing. Here’s what ground it cov­ers:

Exam­ine the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

‘Seg­re­gat­ed By Design’ exam­ines the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

Prej­u­dice can be birthed from a lack of under­stand­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate details of the past. With­out being aware of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al res­i­den­tial poli­cies the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment enact­ed dur­ing the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, one might have a neg­a­tive view today of neigh­bor­hoods where African Amer­i­cans live or even of African Amer­i­cans them­selves.

We can com­pen­sate for this unlaw­ful seg­re­ga­tion through a nation­al polit­i­cal con­sen­sus that leads to leg­is­la­tion. And this will only hap­pen if the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans under­stand how we got here. Like Jay‑Z said in a recent New York Times inter­view, “you can’t have a solu­tion until you start deal­ing with the prob­lem: What you reveal, you heal.” This is the major chal­lenge at hand: to edu­cate fel­low cit­i­zens of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al inequal­i­ty that we’ve woven and, on behalf of our gov­ern­ment, accept respon­si­bil­i­ty to fix it.

Learn more about the film at the web­site, Seg­re­gat­ed by Design. And find it added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca 

How Zora Neale Hurston & Eleanor Roo­sevelt Helped Cre­ate the First Real­is­tic African Amer­i­can Baby Doll (1951)

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)