Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America, is certainly one of the most powerful and influential books about cities to have been published in the past decade. Rothstein, a fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley), systematically explores the origins of racial segregation in U.S. cities, Northern and Southern alike, and the legal and extra-legal means used to create and enforce patterns that persist to this day.

A new 20-minute video by Rothstein and award-winning filmmaker Mark Lopez, entitled Segregated by Design, distills Rothstein’s message into a simple, yet unflinching, look at the most destructive legacy of our country’s very recent—not distant—past. Unlike the book, you can finish this on your lunch break. And you should. Even if you think you know this history already, Rothstein and Lopez connect the dots of local zoning and investment decisions, federal housing policy and highway building, the prejudices roiling American society, and perhaps most importantly, the present day: the ways in which segregation never really ended, but still defines our lives in ways as profound as who gets a fair shot at a good education and an upwardly-mobile life.

Less directly, Segregated by Design makes another point that we think is important for Strong Towns advocates to understand: decline is not normal. Most Americans alive today have never lived in a time when “the inner city” wasn’t a locus of poverty, physical blight and social disintegration. Yet many of us fail to grasp the extent to which public policy had its thumb on the scale from the start in creating those conditions.

We can have strong neighborhoods—absolutely, necessarily including poor and working-class ones—that incrementally renew and revitalize themselves, and lift up their inhabitants in a virtuous cycle. We have in the past, as with the so-called “slums” that Jane Jacobs famously walked and wrote admiringly about in the 1950s and 1960s. We can again. But we need to return to investing in poor neighborhoods instead of writing them off; obsessively and lovingly maintaining the world we’ve built instead of chasing shiny and new while the old falls apart; and entrusting and empowering all of our communities—of every race and social class—to play an active role in co-creating the places they have to inhabit every day.

Here’s Segregated by Design: