The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
by Mehrsa Baradaran
View on GoodreadsLaw professor Mehrsa Baradaran's history of Black banking in America — from Reconstruction's Freedman's Savings Bank through 20th-century Black-owned banks to the contemporary fintech moment — as a case study in why "more Black banks" doesn't and can't close the racial wealth gap.
Core ideas
- Black banks were structurally constrained to serve communities that had been systematically denied wealth-building access through redlining, employment discrimination, and educational segregation — the banks weren't allowed to compete in the markets where wealth was actually accumulating.
- The "buy Black, bank Black" framing is treated with appropriate complication — community-level circulation of dollars doesn't address the upstream extraction; it's a downstream patch on a structural problem.
- The policy implication is uncomfortable for both sides — purely market-based solutions can't close a wealth gap created by 350 years of policy, and that means the fix has to be policy-side and structural.
Published2017
Pages371
ISBN9780674970953
ReadJul 2022
