The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap - Hardcover

Baradaran, Mehrsa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674970950 ISBN 13: 9780674970953

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2017

Synopsis

“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”
―Ta-Nehisi Coates

When 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.

About this title

About the Author

Mehrsa Baradaran is Professor of Law at UCI Law and a celebrated authority on banking law. In addition to the prizewinning The Color of Money, she is author of How the Other Half Banks. She has advised US senators and representatives on policy and spoken at national and international forums including the World Bank.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674970950
• ISBN 13: 9780674970953
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384