The Color of Money

What Hacker News says

1. beckman466Dec 2021
   yes, i also liked the book The Color of Money by UCI law professor Mehrsa Baradaran.

   here's some of her research findings:

   "Today, Black families have a median net worth of $11,000 compared to a white family’s median of $141,900. Pew Research Center data reveals that white families have 13 times more wealth than Black families. The wealth gap exists at every income level, with a third of Black families having no assets at all. The perpetuation of poverty is stunning—75 percent of Black children who grow up in families in the bottom wealth category remain in that same category as adults. A 2013 study found that for white families, every additional dollar they earn in income leads to $5.19 in wealth. For Black families, each dollar creates only 69 cents in total wealth. This growing divide perpetuates injustices hard to capture in the latest news of riots and protests. The racial wealth gap is where past injustice breeds present suffering."

   our systems are still inherently racist and we are a long ways away from equity.

   source: https://prospect.org/civil-rights/no-justice-no-peace-fix-th...

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2. marc__1Mar 2021
   A book that goes deeper into this conversation is The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

   Well worth the read, the story had a lot of nuances

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758210

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3. beckman466Apr 2021
   > because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.

   No, systemic racism caused by capitalism is the root cause of that.

   The capitalist media is but one contributing factor of this.

   The root cause for this rioting is hundreds of years of systemic oppression: redlining (now digital redlining in the digital age), racist banking policies (for a detailed analysis see ‘The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap‘ and ‘How The Other Side Banks‘, both by law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran), the school to prison pipeline, the CIA and Reagan’s ‘war on drugs‘ that flooded inner cities with crack in the 1980’s causing the crack cocaine epidemic (journalist Gary Webb exposed this), the CIA also systemically murdered the leaders of socialist black liberation movements (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, etc.), and more (these are only a few examples that I can think of right now).

   Wage slavery of course exploits and oppresses all of the working class (the 99% of us who don’t own capitalist property: technology in the form of trade secrets, patent claims, etc. (the means of production)). Yet black and brown people (both in the global north and the global south) have especially had a harder time simply because of the color of their skin.

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4. thulecitizenJan 2020
   I hear you. At the same time, I see this story of “if your life isn't exciting, it's your fault” too often, and I call bullshit.

   I believe this story is incredibly harmful because it doesn't help 'non-participants’ or 'spectators’, as you call them, understand the limitations of their society, and how this impacts them. One of the things I'd like to do instead is to help show them (and anyone else who is interested in reflection or meaningful social change) how these systemic inequities are often slowly grinding them down, and how they can organize to change the system. If I don't help do this I think I might doom them to a life of self-loathing, not to mention that I myself would live in a world of self-masturbatory self-aggrandizement, not really connecting to others and relying instead on my perceived superiorty for comfort and safety; which I think starts to taste bitter if used as a strategy for a long enough period of time.

   Don't see the inequities I am talking about? I promise you they are there when you start looking. Some of the ones I've found most glaring are (1) the systemic racism at home in the US, (2) the ongoing battles of the Global South against Global North-controlled extractive and exploitative debt, and (3) imperialistic Intellectual Property agreements which causes ongoing local and global information asymmetries. The bravery of the men and women who have been fighting in these battles is astounding: Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Cornel West, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Sankara, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, MLK, Paulo Freire, Cedric Robinson, and many more.

   Besides Anand Giridharadas and Rutger Bregman, a recent example of someone doing this important work is Law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, author of 'The Color of Money’. There is a great summary of her arguments here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/banking-against-black-ca...

   I think these are some noteworthy excerpts:

   "The problem is, black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why. Black people were systematically excluded from New Deal policies, including the subsidized FHA mortgages that proved fundamental in increasing white wealth, through redlining and racial covenant agreements. Where black banks did exist, they were consistently less well funded, less profitable, and made fewer loans than white banks, rendering them powerless to substantially improve the prospects of black community members. And herein lies one of the most important lessons of The Color of Money — over the course of American history, white economic success has often been subsidized by black dollars, rather than the other way around."

   and:

   "Even as Baradaran criticizes the implementation of black capitalism, she claims several times that the reason black banking does not succeed in lifting black people out of poverty is that the mechanisms of free-market capitalism were blocked from proper functioning by the “structural inequalities” of racism, as if these existed outside and apart from capitalism, and infected it. Racism made capitalism sick, and if we could fix the former, the latter would deliver equal benefits to all. And yet, one can take the historical evidence she presents to argue something quite different: racism is embedded in the foundations of American capitalism."

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