We have seen, just this week (actually for the last few years), protests about the way Black Americans are treated by police officers. If the last few political cycles have taught us anything, it is America still struggles with its 'original sin' of slavery and the ugly descendants of slavery: discrimination, segregation, inequality, despair.

But reading about inequality and unfairness, for me, catalyzes me for action. I meditate, read, drink tea, Netflix and chill. In my previous life I was a policy analyst and I now work in the finance industry as a financial planner. Usually, the book has both a financial angle and a policy tint. I think the last nonfiction book to do this for me was Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right or maybe The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. I go out and buy several copies and press them into friends hands with the fervor of a recent convert and tell them they 'NEED' to read it. 'to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.'Įvery few years there is a book that is so powerful it turns me into a book nerd, policy evangelical. 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. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. 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.īaradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. 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.

Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. 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. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”

The color of money mehrsa baradaran