The Color of Money

Mehrsa Baradaran

Related Links

• 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
• 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”
• 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
• Read a Wall Street Journal article, informed by discussion with Baradaran, on “the battle to keep Black banks alive”
• 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 Los Angeles Times coverage, informed by discussion with Baradaran, of the merger of Los Angeles’s Broadway Federal Bank and Washington, DC’s City First Bank to form the largest Black-led bank in the United States
• In a Bloomberg Businessweek report informed by discussion with Baradaran, read about rapper and activist Killer Mike’s longstanding support of the #BankBlack movement
• At the Yahoo!Finance program The Ticker, watch Baradaran discuss why communities of color need capital to build capital
• On the NPR Planet Money series “The Indicator,” listen to Baradaran explain how in 1934 the Federal Housing Administration “created an American middle class, and they coded it as white&rduqo;
• Read a Ms. feature on public banking (such as postal banking, proposed in Baradaran’s How the Other Half Banks) as a solution for many American societal ills that disproportionately affect Black people
• Read a CNBC report on how The Color of Money inspired Netflix to bank Black
• Read Baradaran’s contribution to the New York Times special project on inequality, “The America We Need,” in which she destroys the neoliberal myth that profit incentives produce the best outcomes for society
• At The American Prospect, read Baradaran’s argument that the American ideals of justice (and peace) for all cannot be realized until America’s racial wealth gap—in areas including housing, banking, and income—is conquered
• Read a Huffington Post interview with Baradaran on the necessity of reparations as a public policy response to the entrenched economic inequities between Black and white Americans
• In the New York Times business column DealBook, read how The Color of Money influenced Netflix to shift up to 2 percent of its holdings, or about $100 million, to financial institutions that focus on black communities
• Consider Baradaran’s argument, in an interview with ProMarket, that “we’ve never had a purely capitalist economy—we’ve had state subsidies for some and exclusion for others”
• Read an Austin Weekly News essay, informed by Baradaran’s research, on how the racial wealth gap disproportionately dooms Black Americans’ efforts to avoid, and survive, COVID-19
• On WBUR (Boston, MA)’s On Point, listen to Baradaran discuss what can be done during and after the COVID-19 pandemic to save America’s small businesses
• At The American Prospect, read Baradaran on how responses to the COVID-19 pandemic should inform America’s ongoing challenges in areas like public health and climate change
• At The Real News Network, read an interview with Baradaran on why the Trump administration’s “Qualified Opportunity Zones” are in fact a scam (one that’s been around for a while, “from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to Donald Trump”) that chiefly benefits billionaires
• In the New York Times, read Baradaran on the Nixonian origins of “black capitalism”
• Listen to Baradaran discuss black banking with Felix Salmon on the Slate Money podcast
• Watch Baradaran describe the destruction of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” on “Greenwood and the Tulsa Race Riots,” an episode of the PBS series Boss: The Black Experience in Business
• At Law and Political Economy, read an online symposium on The Color of Money featuring an initial essay by Baradaran and responses from fellow scholars of law, history, and capitalism
• On the new Vox show Explained (available on Netflix), watch Baradaran define the racial wealth gap and explore how “yesterday’s injustice becomes today’s inequality”
• Following on her appearance on Explained, listen to Baradaran describe to Vox’s Ezra Klein how African Americans were systematically locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America
• Listen to Baradaran discuss predatory lending and the intergenerational racial wealth gap on the Brooklyn-based Michael Brooks Show [at 26:00]
• Read a Public Books Q&A with Baradaran on the problems with assuming that “racial capitalism” can be fixed straightforwardly by supporting black-owned banks
• On the history of capitalism podcast Who Makes Cents?, listen to Baradaran explain how the popular embrace of “banking Black” distracts from more far-reaching solutions to the racial wealth gap
• On WUNC’s The State of Things, listen to Baradaran discuss whether the United States will ever close its racial wealth gap
• Read a Washington Post essay by Baradaran explaining the origins of the “dependent poor” myth and arguing that more government action, not less, is required if we are to truly win the “War on Poverty”
• On WNYC’s The Takeaway, listen to Baradaran discuss the structural failures of free-market capitalism in mitigating the racial wealth gap
• At Boston Review, read an adapted chapter from The Color of Money on Nixon’s embrace of black capitalism and the way it provided lip service to equality while undermining demands for concrete economic policy changes to reduce inequality
• Watch (or read transcripts of) The Real News Network’s in-depth interview with Baradaran on the roots of the racial wealth gap after the Civil War, twentieth-century government policies that further entrenched inequality, and the struggles of “black capitalism” today: Part I | Part II | Part III
• At Fortune, read Baradaran’s argument that large banks like Wells Fargo must be prosecuted criminally for wrongdoing, because even large fines have been shown to have little impact on their future behavior
• Listen to Baradaran discuss the tragedy of the growing racial wealth gap on Crooked Media’s Pod Save the People [at 45:50]
• Listen to Baradaran talk with Johns Hopkins University’s Nathan Connolly and Morgan State University’s Jared Ball about capitalism, banking, and the problems of “black capitalism” on the podcast iMiXWHATiLiKE! and on the Center for Emerging Media (Baltimore, MD)’s Mark Steiner Show
• Read a Next City argument, underscored by Baradaran’s research, that black banks need policy changes in addition to infusions of capital
• At Dazed, read about black capitalism in the year since the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency
• Listen to Baradaran explain the ongoing impact of slavery on the economics of black communities on The Intercept’s podcast Intercepted
• Read Baradaran’s in-depth interview with Splinter in which she explains “pure” versus “government-subsidized” capitalism—and black capital’s ghettoized experience with the former
• Listen to Baradaran discuss the history of banking inequality and the #BankBlack movement on WNYC’s The Takeaway
• Read an Atlantic essay that underscores Baradaran’s conclusions on the limits of black economic self-sufficiency and the government’s role in perpetuating the racial wealth gap

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