This paper from the Economic Policy Institute encourages a critical examination of the role of structural racism, as embedded in policy, that has fostered extreme inequality in the St. Louis metropolitan area—made apparent after the shooting of Michael Brown. Author Richard Rothstein, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, finds that the institutionalization of racially prejudiced real estate, banking, insurance, and land use policies at the federal, state, and local level, fostered and continue to promulgate racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty, unemployment, and oppressive policing.