The Color of Law v. Owned

One of the three parts for my Contemporary Lit Final

         The Color of Law is a book by Richard Rothstein, while Owned: A Tale of Two Americas is a movie directed by Giorgio Angelini. Both of these works are about segregation in the housing market in America.
         While The Color of Law focuses more on how segregation affects the overall population, Owned: A Tale of Two Americas focuses more on how housing segregation affects the individual. Most people depended on subsidies provided by the federal government. Director Giorgio Angelini made it a focus of his movie to go to individual people who lived during the worst of the housing crisis what they thought about it. One person who was in the film multiple times said that, “Baltimore in many ways, is the ground zero for racial apartheid in America.” Lawrence Brown.
         Both of these works have very different tones and emotions. While The Color of Law is more academic and historical in tone, Owned is more narrative-driven and emotionally resonant. The Color of Law is heavily reliant on policies, legal cases, and documentation, and Owned has more of a collection of memoirs, reports, and personal stories.
         Although Rothstein is the author of The Color of Law and is featured a couple of times in the film, the film is not heavily based on Rothstein’s opinions. Owned: A Tale of Two Americas features multiple different people, such as Jimmy Silvestri, Lawrence Brown, Emily Ain, who shares her father’s Gregory Ain’s opinions, Jim Klinge, and Greg Butler. Because of the wide variety of people featured in the film, it can be easier to relate to and understand what is being said in the film. Rothstein does involve a few people in his book, however, it is a small number, focusing more on written facts and not personal stories and opinions, which can make it harder to follow along and understand. This makes the book better for older people who are better at understanding written facts, while the film is easier for younger people to understand.
         In Owned, the creator of the first mass-produced housing development was mentioned a fair number of times. William Levitt said that, “No man who owns his own home and lock can be a communist because he has too much to do.” By being able to hear more of what Levitt believed, it helps to understand how segregation in housing kind of started. In the film, it is mentioned that being able to own a home helped to be viewed as a citizen, because it showed that you worked hard. This made it hard for black people and minorities to get homes because, although they usually worked harder than white people, they were always lower on the economic ladder. After all, prices were higher for them.