The Color of Money
eBook - PDF

The Color of Money

Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Color of Money

Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

About this book

"Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work."
—Ta-Nehisi Coates


"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."
—The Atlantic


"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."
—Ezra Klein


When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks.

With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted "black capitalism," a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But 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. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy.

"Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

"A must read for anyone interested in closing America's racial wealth gap."
—Black Perspectives

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Yes, you can access The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Economics & Banks & Banking. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Epigraph
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction
  7. 1. Forty Acres or a Savings Bank
  8. 2. Capitalism without Capital
  9. 3. The Rise of Black Banking
  10. 4. The New Deal for White America
  11. 5. Civil Rights Dreams, Economic Nightmares
  12. 6. The Decoy of Black Capitalism
  13. 7. The Free Market Confronts Black Poverty
  14. 8. The Color of Money Matters
  15. Epilogue
  16. Notes
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. Index