Spoiler alert: It’s not by chance. You must read TNC’s piece at The Atlantic today, about housing policy in the 1950s and how it created and reinforced the racial wealth gap. It’s a story of legalized exploitation, of how the structures and policies of the United States government were not perverted, but used as intended, to create an economic underclass.

Jim Crow — Northern or Southern — is usually rendered to us as an archaic system in which people irrationally decide to separate from each other just based on skin color. There’s a reason that so many of us remember Martin Luther King’s line about little white boys and little black boys holding hands. It’s comforting to us. Less comforting ...