In a recent exchange in these pages, Richard Walker and Richard Rothstein sparred over the culpability of the New Deal in the invention, elaboration, or perpetuation of racial segregation. In his pointed critique of Rothstein’s Color of Law, Walker claims that racism and racial segregation were “deeply embedded in American social structures” and that the New Deal only reluctantly “lined up with the prevailing practices of racial segregation.” This is a familiar refrain in New Deal scholarship, that pragmatic concessions to Jim Crow — in the South and in Congress — were the price for any progress on social, labor, or housing policy.

In his rejoinder, Rothstein argues that “the New Deal did not merely concede to private bigotry but pursued independent racial policies that did much to create a segregated landscape,” and, more important, that we should have expected much more from federal policy. It is one thing for rapacious realtors and racist homeowners associations to sustain segregation, in this view, but it is quite another for public actors with the Fourteenth Amendment in their back pocket to do the same.

Both Walker and Rothstein make strong points, and the distance between the two is not as wide as either suggest. There is substantial agreement that private and public mechanisms of segregation were well established before the 1930s. Walker is unsurprised that federal housing policy echoed, protected, sustained, and embedded these mechanisms. Rothstein, for his part, is horrified.