Watch Baradaran’s conversation with CNBC’s Jon Fortt and Andrew Ross Sorkin on historic patterns of inequality in the United States-exclusionary zoning, redlining, racial covenants, and the structure of school funding-and what can be done to reduce inequality within one generation.Read a Wall Street Journal article, informed by discussion with Baradaran, on “the battle to keep Black banks alive”.Read a Center of American Progress report by Danyelle Solomon, Mehrsa Baradaran, and Lily Roberts on how postal banking would address long-term structural inequity in the American economy.Watch Professor Baradaran and other experts at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (November 2020) panel discussion “What’s Next? The State of the American Economy”.At MarketWatch, read an in-depth interview with Mehrsa Baradaran on the origins of her research and why access and legal rights are not sufficient tools for reducing inequality in situations of entrenched economic hardship.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.īaradaran'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. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. 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. 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. 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.

The color of money mehrsa