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The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
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About The Color Of Money: Black Banks And The Racial
Product Description “Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.” ―Ta-Nehisi CoatesWhen the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks.The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not “control the black dollar” due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps.Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking’s relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth. Review “Lays out how, over centuries, policymakers wrote Black Americans out of the economic system…Baradaran’s work resonates now as millions protest around the U.S.―speaking out not only against police brutality against Black Americans, but the systemic racism that pervades America’s institutions.” ― Huffington Post “Baradaran…provides a deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.” ― Gillian B. White , The Atlantic “Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why…Banking today already offers low interest loans and free services to the wealthy, while reserving payday lending and check cashing for those with the least resources. Baradaran’s lesson is that a separate system of black capitalism would intensify, rather than ameliorate, this dynamic along the lines of race.” ― Armond Towns and Carolyn Hardin , Los Angeles Review of Books “Baradaran’s point is to show how white and Black Americans effectively live in two separate economies… As a work of history, the book contains a disturbingly coherent narrative of racist plunder spanning from the Freedman’s Bureau bank to today’s payday lenders… Baradaran’s book is a must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.” ― Guy Emerson Mount , Black Perspectives “Extraordinary… Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America, and the way the rhetoric of equal treatment under the law was weaponized, as soon as slavery ended, against efforts to achieve economic equality.” ― Ezra Klein , The Ezra Klein Show “Baradaran has produced an important, sobering assessment of historic and contemporary African American banks… [She] provides an overview of American and African American economic history from the era of slavery to the present.” ― Robert E. Weems, Jr. , American Historical Review “Anyone who manages money, invests in others’ livelihoods or lives in America should read The Color of Money…The book digs into financial institutions and policies that are responsible for creating and maintaining racial inequalities in the United States…The b
