A particularly important example in this regard is that of the Freedman’s Bank, which was seen by the public as trustworthy because it was backed by Abraham Lincoln’s government but was actually run as a private investment bank with management personnel actively engaged in speculation. Noting that 60% of black Americans - relative to 20% of white Americans - are either unbanked or underbanked, Baradaran describes how depictions that attribute such inequality simplistically to racism ignore the colossal impact of the much subtler forces of ‘commerce, credit, money and segregation’ that underpin it, which have played a largely silent role in the wealth gap that characterises contemporary US society.īlack banking has its origins in the small military banks which formed during the Civil War in the 1860s to hold the wages of black soldiers. Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money studies the role of financial structures in the American racial wealth gap. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.

This book is not only a valuable historical commentary on the relationship between wealth inequity and racial discrimination, writes Juvaria Jafri, but also contains rich material on the political economy of financial institutions, the role of property ownership in perpetuating inequality and self-help as an alternative to structural change. In The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, Mehrsa Baradaran studies the crucial role that financial structures have played in creating and maintaining racial inequalities in the United States.

The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran