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

Mehrsa Baradaran

Sep 2017 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Lisa Reneé Pitts

About this audiobook

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. 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. Mehrsa 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.

Ratings and reviews

This has been one of the best books I've listened to that describes how the lineage wealth gap was expanded post reconstruction. Policies were enacted that excluded ADOS people from the wealth building that was available to white people and the people that could access American whiteness through practicing racism. The influence of the government through propaganda and a slow steady genocide has decimated the black community. It even has black people participating in our own demise trying to practice black capitalism without government support.

About the author

Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. The author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks, she has advised US senators and congresspeople on policy and spoken at national and international forums including the World Bank. She lives in San Clemente, California.

Lisa Renee Pitts is an award-winning actress in theater, television, and film, as well as an accomplished audiobook narrator and an AudioFile Earphones Award winner.