The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

by Mehrsa Baradaran

Support for black banking and black capitalism have been consistent policy band-aid solutions, a decoy response to the fundamental challenge of overcoming America’s legacy of slavery.

The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape deep poverty inevitably become victims of that same poverty.

In the antebellum era, Christian religious principles were exploited to provide the rationale for racial subjugation.

the first blacks to own a home in a formerly white neighborhood paid a premium to buy the home to break the color barrier. So values rose slightly, and then, as more blacks entered the neighborhood, home values suffered a drastic decline.

We might want to apply the following short litmus tests to any policy proposal: does the program require some collective sacrifice or does it place the burden of closing the wealth gap entirely on the black community? If the latter, this is a cop-out that refuses to acknowledge that the black community did not create the problem in the first place.