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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henrywood. Two segments today.

Cheryl Cashin will talk about the history, mechanisms, and effects of residential segregation by race and class in the US.

And the economist Peter Victor and Robert Poland will talk about economic growth in the climate crisis.

Can we solve the crisis without junking growth?

Residential segregation by race to a lesser extent class is one of the most prominent features of life in the US.

But before the early 20th century, racial segregation was largely unknown in our cities.

How did it come to be? And what does it do to us?

To answer those questions, here's Cheryl Cashin, who's just out with a book, White Space Black Hood, Opportunity Hording, and segregation in the age of inequality from Beacon Press.

Her day job is as professor of law at Georgetown. Cheryl Cashin.

There's a habit of American thought where we blame individual actions for what turn out to be social and political problems.

Issues around residential segregation have deep, deep roots in public policy and also the actions of institutional actors like banks, right?

Let's go back into that history. How did really serious residential segregation get going in the United States?

It began primarily as a reaction to the black, great migrants beginning in the teens as waves of black Americans left the South, the flea, Jim Crow segregation going north, Midwest and West cities.

I give the example of Cleveland that actually hadn't had residential segregation and black people could live where they wanted, suddenly feared an invasion.

And they started through series of action, exclusionary racial zoning, stream, cream court strikes it down, restrictive covenants straight up violence.

But to your point, it's the federal government that really begins to institutionalize segregation when it decided to ensure 30-year mortgages, to convince lenders to create this new product to bring homeownership to the masses.

And the federal government says we'll ensure mortgages, but only in white areas. So you lenders must redline.

This was 1930s. Right in the 1930s. So it's official policy. Every major black neighborhood where great migrants landed, they marked them with a D, the lowest rating, marked them express the hazardous.

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