Theodore Cross, understood that black banking had become a diversion. He wrote in 1971 that black banks were still just “toy banks” or “specks of gold dust in the $1 trillion private capital and credit markets of America.” Yet they had become magnets for government money and press, for, as he explained, “when the heat is on the temptations are great to build a few monuments to black affluence.”187 Shining a spotlight on a few successful black banks obscured the true problems of the wealth gap and the ghetto economic trap. At best, black capitalism was being used as state paternalism, but at
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