"In many cases," says Richard Rothstein, "the federal government did create...segregation in metropolitan areas and in cities that had never known segregation before. In other cases...it did reinforce segregation that was already in existence. But the country was much, much more segregated as a result of these federal policies than it was before, or would be today without them."

Rothstein is a former education reporter at The New York Times, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall Institute and University of California at Berkeley's Haas Instititue. He's also the author of The Color of Law, a revisionist history of housing segregation in America that argues that government policy was a major force in creating ghettos and making sure that blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods.

On today's episode of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie and Rothstein discuss the role that government intervention played in establishing the patterns of segregated residency that persist to this day and how that squares with the current political climate.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.