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.
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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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 book breaks down the stereotypes of self-help dogma that
tout ‘save more, don’t spend so much or pull yourself up’ and
rejects the idea that those who are not wealthy just need more
financial literacy or mentorship.
*TechCrunch*
Combining a rich historical sweep with in-depth analysis of the
mechanics of banking, Baradaran unpacks the brutal dilemma facing
black banks—how to create black wealth in the context of a
segregated and unequal ‘Jim Crow’ economy. Baradaran’s brilliant
and devastating analysis leads to an irrefutable conclusion: the
racial wealth gap is the product of state law and public policy,
and will only be reversed when the same governmental tools that
created segregation and discrimination are deployed to end it.
*Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle
over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban
America*
Observers as different in time and ideology as Frederick Douglass,
Malcolm X, and Ronald Reagan have argued that black banks represent
perhaps the best hope for securing a just society. As Baradaran
powerfully maintains, however, any effort to restrict
responsibility to banks alone or black people alone will always be
doomed to failure. A swift, beautiful, and chastening book, The
Color of Money reminds us, yet again, that black poverty is not
really an economic problem, but rather a political problem
requiring political solutions.
*N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate
and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida*
Baradaran provides a pivotal understanding of how our racialized
history structured the disparity between the black and white share
of the nation’s wealth and how it continues to inhibit the
development of black capital and black banks. Her book puts to
rest, once and for all, the trope that self-help, buying black, and
black banking are the panacea to black prosperity.
*Darrick Hamilton, The New School for Social Research*
In this important book, law professor Mehrsa Baradaran uses the
history of black banking from emancipation to the present as a
vehicle for exploring the origins and persistence of the racial
wealth gap in America. This is more than a history of financial
institutions, though. It is a probing, revelatory study of racism
and capitalism in the making of modern America, one that reveals
how segregation, racial prejudice, and black economic disadvantage
became mutually reinforcing.
*Andrew W. Kahrl, University of Virginia*
A stimulating walk-through of the history of the expansion of the
wealth gap between black and white Americans that has grown even
larger since the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks from
slavery.
*Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy*
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