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

by Mehrsa Baradaran

“We are calling on all black people to withdraw every dime they have in OneUnited if they don’t resolve this issue,” said one minister. Mayor Thomas M. Menino said during a protest, “You’ve shown the whole country we’re not going to stand for this corporate, greedy individual to take away one of the bedrocks of the city of Boston.”158 In an interview with the Washington Post, another pastor analogized the predicament to the biblical parable of the ungrateful servant. The story concerns a servant whose debt is mercifully forgiven by his creditor, a powerful king. This servant, having just been forgiven, turns around and sends his own debtor to prison for not paying him. The king then severely punishes the servant for his ingratitude. In the analogy, OneUnited was the ungrateful servant who, having received bailout funds from the king (or here the more powerful Treasury Department), had turned around to cruelly foreclose on the nation’s oldest black church. “We forgave the banks and bailed them out, and now they’re coming after the little borrower,” said Pastor Ryan Bell.159 But the bailout was not quite a biblical wiping out of debt. The bank still had to pay back the federal government, and it was struggling to do so while facing heat for having received possibly “unethical” and certainly unearned “special treatment.”160