Research Catalog

Title

The color of money : black banks and the racial wealth gap / Mehrsa Baradaran.

Author

Baradaran, Mehrsa, 1978-

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

371 pages; 25 cm

Summary

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.--

Subject

• African Americans > Economic conditions
• African American banks > History
• Discrimination in banking > United States > History
• African Americans > Finance
• Wealth > United States > History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Forty acres or a savings bank -- Capitalism without capital -- The rise of black banking -- The new deal for white America -- Civil rights dreams, economic nightmares -- The decoy of black capitalism -- The free market confronts black poverty -- The color of money matters.

Call Number

Sc E 17-1138

ISBN

• 9780674970953
• 0674970950

LCCN

2017011011

OCLC

2017011011

Author

Baradaran, Mehrsa, 1978- author.

Title

The color of money : black banks and the racial wealth gap / Mehrsa Baradaran.

Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

Sc E 17-1138