The Color of Money Quotes

“W. E. B Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that “we have not tried it.”20 Perhaps it is time to try.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Advocates of libertarianism and neoliberalism claimed to want more liberty for individuals and a smaller government, but in reality they only wanted less government for the wealthy and the white.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“In Where Do We Go from Here, King had said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Ultimately, the FHA was an empty promise. The act allowed the country to publicly denounce segregation while never actually pursuing integration.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“It is worth distilling this message in order to fully appreciate the irony. The story was that after decades of New Deal–era federal subsidies had created a white middle class, reinforced a segregated black underclass, and created cyclic poverty that made it difficult for many to find shelter and food without government aid, it was black people who were being unjustly enriched by the overly generous hand of the state.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Then, as now, the public must be convinced that their own interests are aligned with the advancement of racial minorities or that they will not suffer when others are promoted.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“freedom would be severely restricted without the ability to fully participate in the economy. Black leaders stressed that emancipation would have to be followed by the accumulation of wealth if the black community was ever to achieve meaningful political equality.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“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.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Instead of working to break down the walls of segregation and the poverty trap they had created, the ghetto would be sent entrepreneurs.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Lifting people out of poverty can have trickle-up economic effects and raise all boats.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Today, black families have an average net wealth of $11,000 compared to a white family’s average of $141,900. Pew data reveals that white families have thirteen times more wealth than black families.20 The wealth gap exists at every income and education level. On average, white families with college degrees have over $300,000 more wealth than black families with college degrees. A third of black families have no assets at all.21 Moreover, studies reveal that the gap is accelerating—over the last thirty years, the average wealth of white families has grown at three times the rate for average black families.22 This growing divide perpetuates injustices hard to capture behind the latest news of riots and protests.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to marvel at America’s democracy, was shocked at the level of racial prejudice he observed in the North. “The prejudice of race,” he wrote, “appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”10”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Slavery, “America’s original sin,” according to James Madison, created the foundation of modern American capitalism.1 It was slavery and the “blood drawn with the lash” that opened the arteries of capital and commerce that led to U.S. economic dominance worldwide.2 The effects of the institution of slavery on American commerce were monumental—3.2 million slaves were worth $1.3 billion in market value, almost equal to the entire gross national product.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Perhaps because the bank was identified with the endeavors of the newly freed negro, wrote historians Kindsor and Sagarin, anyone who dared to raise a cry against the mismanagement was charged with being anti-negro. In as much as the enemies of the negro were not interested in the bank, and the friends were effectively silenced with the anti-negro charge, there was no exposure of the condition of the bank. The belief that the failures of black institutions could not be accurately studied because of the sensitivity of the race issue, whether accurate or not, would be a recurring theme through history.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“The scheme began to unravel following the Panic of 1873 when railroad investments failed. The bank experienced several runs at the height of the panic. The panic would not have affected the bank if it had been a savings bank, but by 1866, the business of the bank had become…reckless speculation, over-capitalization, stock manipulation, intrigue and bribery, and downright plundering…. In a last ditch effort to save the bank, the Trustees appointed Frederick Douglas as Bank President in March of 1874. Douglass did not ask to be nominated and the Bank Board knew that Douglass had no experience in banking, but they felt that his reputation and popularity would restore confidence to fleeing depositors….Douglas lent the bank $10,000 of his own money to cover the bank’s illiquid assets….Douglass quickly discovered that the bank was full of dead men’s bones, rottenness and corruption. As soon as Douglass realized that the bank was headed towards certain failure, he imposed drastic spending cuts to limit depositors’ losses. He then relayed this information to Congress, underscoring the bank’s insolvency, and declaring that he could no longer ask his people to deposit their money in it. Despite the other Trustees’ attempts to convince Congress otherwise, Congress sided with Douglass, and on June 20, 1874, Congress amended the Charter to authorize the Trustees to end operations. Within a few weeks’ time, the bank’s doors were shut for good on June 29, 1874, leaving 61,131 depositors without access to nearly $3 million dollars in deposits. More than half of accumulated black wealth disappeared through the mismanagement of the Freedman’s Savings Bank. And what is most lamentable…is the fact that only a few of those who embezzled and defrauded the one-time liquid assets of this bank were ever prosecuted….Congress did appoint a commission led by John AJ Cresswell to look into the failure and to recover as much of the deposits as possible. In 1880, Henry Cook testified about the bank failure and said that bank’s depositors were victims of a widespread universal sweeping financial disaster. In other words, it was the Market’s fault, not his. The misdeeds of the bank’s management never came to light.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“For black families, each dollar creates only sixty-nine cents in total wealth.25 This is why the wealth gap between blacks and whites can continue to grow even when de jure discrimination ended decades ago.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Even with the bundling and splitting of tranches, Wall Street needed more mortgage borrowers, so it created the subprime market. These were loans to borrowers who did not meet the underwriting standards set forth by the GSEs, or “prime” loans. Subprime borrowers were riskier borrowers, either because they had fewer assets, lower credit score, or lower incomes. But in finance, higher risk is rewarded with higher yield, so mortgage brokers made even higher premiums from subprime loans.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“James Forman was even more blunt: "If we can't sit at the table, then let's knock the fucking legs off!”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“This was just the first of several pivotal points in U.S. history when government reformers would choose to grant political rights instead of achieving real justice by addressing economic inequality”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“New Deal programs that would have sent aid to build housing in the urban ghetto were instead used to create white suburbs that reinforced and perpetuated racial segregation for the rest of the century.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“The wealth gap is where the injustices sown in the past grow imperceptibly in the present.23 The cumulative effects of discrimination, segregation, and the economic detour for black businesses have created self-perpetuating forces that continue to make black wealth accumulation difficult.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“King felt compelled to respond: “You don’t have to go to Karl Marx to learn how to be a revolutionary. I didn’t get my inspiration from Karl Marx; I got it from a man named Jesus.”193”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“By the 1950s, 85 percent of the homes sold to blacks in Chicago were sold on contract with exploitative terms.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of FHA loans went to white Americans.30 In some cases, whole cities were ineligible for FHA funds.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Frederick Douglass remarked that “the history of civilization shows that no people can well rise to a high degree of mental or even moral excellence without wealth. A people uniformly poor and compelled to struggle for barely a physical existence will be dependent and despised by their neighbors and will finally despise themselves.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“In the antebellum era, Christian religious principles were exploited to provide the rationale for racial subjugation.4 Not only were slavery and white supremacy condoned by God, but it was seen as God’s will that white men exploit the labor of the black race. In The Christian Doctrine of Slavery, a Presbyterian minister concluded, “It may be that Christian slavery is God’s solution of the problem [of labor] about which the wisest statesmen of Europe confess themselves ‘at fault.’ ”5”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“The institution of slavery was so at odds with the liberal notions of equality avowed in America’s founding documents that a theory of racial hierarchy was used to explain away the dissonance.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“a group, blacks are more unbanked than any other race—60 percent of the black population is unbanked or underbanked, while only 20 percent of whites are in the same category.15 What this means is that blacks disproportionately rely on fringe banks, leading to a debt trap. Blacks pay higher interest on mortgages and small loans. They pay more fees on basic services than similarly situated whites and they are taken to court disproportionately by creditors for very small debts.16”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“The economic oppression of slavery was justified in the eighteenth century by a corrupted version of Christian dogma that held that the white race had a divine right to subject the black one.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“In fact, the dilemma faced by black banks is highlighted when contrasted with the viable banks created by Italian, Jewish, German, Irish, and Asian immigrants. Each of these immigrant groups faced discrimination and exclusion like the black population, but the key difference was that none of them was systematically, uniformly, and legally segregated to the extent and for the length of time the black community was. Many immigrants eventually left their overcrowded ghettos and settled in suburbs where, through violence, zoning restrictions, and racial covenants, blacks were barred.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap