"The white folks didn't let us travel in their circle, so we made our own........"
Posted on 02/05/2018 9:19:10 AM PST by re_tail20
Professor Mehrsa Baradaran is the author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, a history of black-owned and black-oriented banks in the United States. It’s not a happy story.
Baradaran’s narrative spans the post-Civil War Reconstruction years to the present day and in it she tracks the government’s basic failure to equip former slaves with trustworthy wealth-building institutions in the 1800s, the disastrous effect poverty and racist economic segregation had on black banks’ ability to serve their community, the cynical use of “black capitalism” rhetoric by mainstream politicians (particularly Richard Nixon) to diffuse demands for meaningful economic justice reforms, and the impossible situation many black financial institutions found themselves in as a result of the Great Recession.
Throughout, Baradaran doesn’t shy away from tough questions about whether economic success is meaningful without corresponding political power, whether banks created only to serve black communities could ever succeed, and what white America’s current responsibility is to an entrenched and growing racial wealth gap.
As a student of history and finance myself, I was fascinated by her book (read my review here), which exposed a side of capitalism and finance about which I know very little. Baradaran and I had a great discussion recently.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Make Change: I want to have you explain some of the history of the Freedman's Savings Bank, which I had never heard of, and which is maybe the most awful story you tell. But I suspect, unless you were a scholar of black banking, most people don't know this story.
Mehrsa Baradaran: It's surprising that we don't know this story…
The Freedmen's Bureau was created by [President Abraham] Lincoln. It is meant to help freed slaves transition into capitalism. You've gone from being capital to becoming...
(Excerpt) Read more at makechange.aspiration.com ...
"The white folks didn't let us travel in their circle, so we made our own........"
Clik on it....all FReeper's should.
This article is crap. Money is green. It does not care what color you are as long as you help make more of it. If money cared about color, Asian Americans (many of whom are darker than African Americans) would not be the most successful group in American. Single parent black households are the root to ALL of African American problems in the USA...
The thing I find most interesting about black non-fiction authors in America today is that they never let facts get in the way of a good politically correct story. This group does not include actual black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.
Oh nooo, racism’s fault, AGAIN!
It’s becoming so tiring.
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