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Mehrsa Baradaran

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The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap Hardcover – September 14, 2017

by Mehrsa Baradaran (Author)

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“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.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Publication date

September 14, 2017
Dimensions

7 x 1.25 x 10 inches
ISBN-10

9780674970953
ISBN-13

978-0674970953
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Editorial Reviews

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 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.”―Sidney A. Johnson, Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0674970950
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (September 14, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780674970953
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674970953
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.52 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.25 x 10 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #845,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,272 in Black & African American History (Books)
- #2,974 in Discrimination & Racism
- #3,330 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
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Professor of Law specializing in financial regulation. Author of How the Other Half Banks, the Color of Money, and the Quiet Coup.

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T&KD

History I didn't learn in school

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

Well written and filled with facts I didn't know - especially regarding FHA loans and veteran's benefits once denied to people based on race. I remember visiting an older sister whose husband was stationed in an Army base in Alabama 60 years ago in 1962. Coming from Michigan I had never seen separate drinking fountains or bathrooms - I was horrified as we passed a chain gang working on the highway. Yet I remember that even in the North the fact that black people might own a nice car and a shabby house was a common joke - now I better understand the housing discrimination they faced. I am glad to see many accomplished black artists and professionals these days - our daughter had the benefit of a wonderful black teacher she admired. Still, I know that there are many black people living in poverty. Our daughter taught in the Bronx for Teach for America and she witnessed parents who often had two jobs just to provide for their families and the hardship this imposed on the children. People need to earn a living wage. Perhaps too many businesses are overpaying the executives and underpaying essential employees. Reparations?? Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the minimum wage and provide affordable housing with low interest mortgages.

One person found this helpful

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Anthony Shannon

Great Read

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2024

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I definitely will be buying a few more to gift to a few young men.

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Darwin8u

Both a Bridge and a Battle Cry

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

"to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships."
- W.E.B. DuBois

Every few years there is a book that is so powerful it turns me into a book nerd, policy evangelical. 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. 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.' Usually, the book has both a financial angle and a policy tint. It usually also explores unfairness. That makes sense. In my previous life I was a policy analyst and I now work in the finance industry as a financial planner. Most days, I'm a pretty mellow guy. I meditate, read, drink tea, Netflix and chill. But reading about inequality and unfairness, for me, catalyzes me for action.

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. We have seen, just this week (actually for the last few years), protests about the way Black Americans are treated by police officers. That subject deserves its own space, so I wont dwell too much on that here, other than to say the interaction of Black Americans and police officers ISN'T simple. It isn't a subject that can easily be explained just by saying police are racists, or unarmed Black Americans should behave differently (different from whom?). There are structural, geographic, economic, historical, and political forces that all contribute to awful outcomes.

Just like blue on black violence isn't easily explained in a tweet or a FB post, the interaction between Black Americans and banks has a long, ugly, and painful history. It is a history that is important to understand if one REALLY wants to explore topics like income inequality, segregation, credit, crony capitalism, corruption, exploitation, state power, wealth, etc... Mehrsa's book explores the policies, laws, programs, politics, economics, and history of black banks AND the history of Black Americans with banks. She points a fairly bleak picture of the fault/chasm that exists between the two financial markets that exist in America. One is the banking structure that exists for a majority of Americans and doesn't need to be explored. But for years that economic structure, that allows people to save (AND BORROW) didn't exist for a large segment of Americans. And when it eventually did, it was skewed heavily. Separate was never equal in banking. Blacks paid a heavy price to save, to borrow (if they could). Even laws that were designed to help pull Americans out of poverty, accumulate wealth and avoid taxes through home ownership, benefited one segment of America while ignoring or fleecing the other.

It is a painful read. It is also necessary. Unlike Mehrsa Baradaran's* previous book, 'How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy', this one spends little/less time on prescriptions. She is laser focused on what is wrong, what went wrong, and why. It is a dense (without ANY of the negative connotations typically associated with that word) book. One that required me to open THREE different post-it flag packages. I was marking things that were new, quotes that amazed, items I didn't want to forget and I often found myself marking 3 or 4 times a page.

A few caveats before I end. This isn't a perfect book. It isn't as exciting as a Michael Lewis book (this probably won't get made into a movie) and the prose isn't as pretty as Robert Caro's LBJ series. But it is important. It is a labor of both love and skill. Reading some chapters in it, I could tell Mehrsa spent months in presidential libraries. Well researched books give me a thrill. Especially when you recognize that a certain nugget of data or quote may never have seen the light of day if it wasn't for the doggedness of a skilled lawyer/historian. 'The Color of Money' deserves to be in the library of anyone who deals with or seriously thinks about income inequality, race, banking, inner cities, etc.

As a white, upper-middle, male who has benefited from educated parents, stability, wealth, and every advantage American history and politicians have blessed me with, it is difficult and humbling to realize just how many of the economic realities I take for granted every day weren't available to the parents of my black friends. Hopefully, more of these same financial realities WILL be available to the children of ALL my friends. Hopefully we can begin to cover both the scars of the disadvantaged, and the economic and social chasms that separate (unfairly) us. This book is both a bridge and a battle cry.

231 people found this helpful

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Eddie

Unerring Truth

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2019

Verified Purchase

An epic exposé!
A highly successful monumental undertaking, which unearthed and scrutinised torrents of evidence based, and yet, uncomfortable truths.
Every stroke of the pen is, shockingly, dripping with painfully ugly but enlightening information.
All traditional hollow platitudes, strenuously erected and embellished to escape, disown and shamelessly revise history and heap blame on generations of black victims - which have by now assumed an art-form by the white establishment - were intelligently deconstructed by way of thorough research and revelation of irrefutable facts.
A telling success was made at debunking elaborately designed devious and scurrilous efforts to whitewash, manipulate and revise immutable historical facts. Equally, here’s a tome of information and knowledge sufficient enough to eternally shame very determined traducers and violators of sacred recorded history.
This audacious work is an odyssey, which at every turn, exposed in broad strokes, the ugly innards and elaborate evil machinations of the despicable original American sin: SLAVERY. And remarkably, in equal measure, it explodes the huge myth called the “American Dream”, as it relates to the Blackman.
The work is imbued with dazzling facts, and ennobling high-minded scholarship attention to details. It is brilliantly rendered in elegant, engaging prose and riveting cadence, that easily recommends it as a masterpiece, and therefore, a must-read for every black person and others that genuinely seek to understand the current sorry situation of the Black population in America, and indeed, the entire emerging world trapped in similar unsavoury situation.
A remarkable work, which succinctly underscores the clarion call for justice and compensation for all the black victims of centuries of blatant and systematic practices of heinous slavery and odious racism in America.
The body of work parades an impressive array of documented evidence that, relentlessly, obliterates any escape route for any shamelessly flighty revisionists and or obscurantists.
Thankfully, just as Truth has proven to be stubbornly constant, this author will be proven to be forever truthful in almost all conclusions.

11 people found this helpful

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Ingrid

Absolutely Brilliant Book

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2019

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This book is absolutely brilliant, for anyone who seeks to know the historical account of the economic marginalization, faced by the African in America. In addition, it is overall inspiring, as it reinforces why, blacks should continue to build wealth.

One person found this helpful

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Cory McCray

Great Historical Context

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2024

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In order to address the issue, you have to recognize the problem and understand the history. "The Color of Money" does just that. Great read!

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Shevvy

Very informative and is a must read!

Reviewed in Canada on January 3, 2023

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its detailed explanation of the racial wealth gap in America. It tackles a lot of misinformation and any age old excuses that try to dismiss that the racial wealth gap exists today. This book is backed up by intensive research and thoroughly explains how the racial wealth gap was created. I really enjoyed learning more about how banks operate and how the past wrongdoings of America actively affect the present. I challenge people to read this book the next time they try to deny that the racial wealth gap exists.

Jordan Michel-Muniz

Magnífico!

Reviewed in Brazil on December 21, 2021

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Livro essencial para entender como a democracia liberal capitalista constrói os apartheids sociais onde aprisiona o povo negro.

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Donna

Excellent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book really shows you that this is not just in the states but the agenda is set Globally, and off course England must always be in the middle of corruption.

Marliemount

Amazing research!

Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2021

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Loaded with valuable information. Amazing research.

Young Kim

Civil rights of accessability to money are colored.

Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2023

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Detailed notes of historic aspects of banking including political motivations and their real intentions taught me that American real power group prefers status quo to revolution toward equal free society.

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