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)


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