--- product_id: 47398165 title: "The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap" brand: "mehrsa baradaran" price: "58858CFA" currency: XOF in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.sn/products/47398165-the-color-of-money-black-banks-and-the-racial-wealth store_origin: SN region: Senegal --- # The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap **Brand:** mehrsa baradaran **Price:** 58858CFA **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by mehrsa baradaran - **How much does it cost?** 58858CFA with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sn](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/47398165-the-color-of-money-black-banks-and-the-racial-wealth) ## Best For - mehrsa baradaran enthusiasts ## Why This Product - Trusted mehrsa baradaran brand quality - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description “Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.” ―Ta-Nehisi Coates When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not “control the black dollar” due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps. Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking’s relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Asin | 0674970950 | | Dimensions | 6.12 x 1.3 x 9.25 inches | | Isbn 10 | 9780674970953 | | Isbn 13 | 978-0674970953 | | Item Weight | 1.52 pounds | | Language | English | | Print Length | 384 pages | | Publication Date | September 14, 2017 | | Publisher | Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press | ## Images ![The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61iMrsPwpvL.jpg) ## Available Options This product comes in different **Format** options. ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Both a Bridge and a Battle Cry *by on Reviewed in the United States September 29, 2017* "to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships."- W.E.B. DuBoisEvery few years there is a book that is so powerful it turns me into a book nerd, policy evangelical. I go out and buy several copies and press them into friends hands with the fervor of a recent convert and tell them they "NEED" to read it. I think the last nonfiction book to do this for me was 'Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right' or maybe 'The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.' Usually, the book has both a financial angle and a policy tint. It usually also explores unfairness. That makes sense. In my previous life I was a policy analyst and I now work in the finance industry as a financial planner. Most days, I'm a pretty mellow guy. I meditate, read, drink tea, Netflix and chill. But reading about inequality and unfairness, for me, catalyzes me for action.If the last few political cycles have taught us anything, it is America still struggles with its "original sin" of slavery and the ugly descendants of slavery: discrimination, segregation, inequality, despair. We have seen, just this week (actually for the last few years), protests about the way Black Americans are treated by police officers. That subject deserves its own space, so I wont dwell too much on that here, other than to say the interaction of Black Americans and police officers ISN'T simple. It isn't a subject that can easily be explained just by saying police are racists, or unarmed Black Americans should behave differently (different from whom?). There are structural, geographic, economic, historical, and political forces that all contribute to awful outcomes.Just like blue on black violence isn't easily explained in a tweet or a FB post, the interaction between Black Americans and banks has a long, ugly, and painful history. It is a history that is important to understand if one REALLY wants to explore topics like income inequality, segregation, credit, crony capitalism, corruption, exploitation, state power, wealth, etc... Mehrsa's book explores the policies, laws, programs, politics, economics, and history of black banks AND the history of Black Americans with banks. She points a fairly bleak picture of the fault/chasm that exists between the two financial markets that exist in America. One is the banking structure that exists for a majority of Americans and doesn't need to be explored. But for years that economic structure, that allows people to save (AND BORROW) didn't exist for a large segment of Americans. And when it eventually did, it was skewed heavily. Separate was never equal in banking. Blacks paid a heavy price to save, to borrow (if they could). Even laws that were designed to help pull Americans out of poverty, accumulate wealth and avoid taxes through home ownership, benefited one segment of America while ignoring or fleecing the other.It is a painful read. It is also necessary. Unlike Mehrsa Baradaran's* previous book, 'How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy', this one spends little/less time on prescriptions. She is laser focused on what is wrong, what went wrong, and why. It is a dense (without ANY of the negative connotations typically associated with that word) book. One that required me to open THREE different post-it flag packages. I was marking things that were new, quotes that amazed, items I didn't want to forget and I often found myself marking 3 or 4 times a page.A few caveats before I end. This isn't a perfect book. It isn't as exciting as a Michael Lewis book (this probably won't get made into a movie) and the prose isn't as pretty as Robert Caro's LBJ series. But it is important. It is a labor of both love and skill. Reading some chapters in it, I could tell Mehrsa spent months in presidential libraries. Well researched books give me a thrill. Especially when you recognize that a certain nugget of data or quote may never have seen the light of day if it wasn't for the doggedness of a skilled lawyer/historian. 'The Color of Money' deserves to be in the library of anyone who deals with or seriously thinks about income inequality, race, banking, inner cities, etc.As a white, upper-middle, male who has benefited from educated parents, stability, wealth, and every advantage American history and politicians have blessed me with, it is difficult and humbling to realize just how many of the economic realities I take for granted every day weren't available to the parents of my black friends. Hopefully, more of these same financial realities WILL be available to the children of ALL my friends. Hopefully we can begin to cover both the scars of the disadvantaged, and the economic and social chasms that separate (unfairly) us. This book is both a bridge and a battle cry. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Unerring Truth *by on Reviewed in the United States April 14, 2019* An epic exposé!A highly successful monumental undertaking, which unearthed and scrutinised torrents of evidence based, and yet, uncomfortable truths.Every stroke of the pen is, shockingly, dripping with painfully ugly but enlightening information.All traditional hollow platitudes, strenuously erected and embellished to escape, disown and shamelessly revise history and heap blame on generations of black victims - which have by now assumed an art-form by the white establishment - were intelligently deconstructed by way of thorough research and revelation of irrefutable facts.A telling success was made at debunking elaborately designed devious and scurrilous efforts to whitewash, manipulate and revise immutable historical facts. Equally, here’s a tome of information and knowledge sufficient enough to eternally shame very determined traducers and violators of sacred recorded history.This audacious work is an odyssey, which at every turn, exposed in broad strokes, the ugly innards and elaborate evil machinations of the despicable original American sin: SLAVERY. And remarkably, in equal measure, it explodes the huge myth called the “American Dream”, as it relates to the Blackman.The work is imbued with dazzling facts, and ennobling high-minded scholarship attention to details. It is brilliantly rendered in elegant, engaging prose and riveting cadence, that easily recommends it as a masterpiece, and therefore, a must-read for every black person and others that genuinely seek to understand the current sorry situation of the Black population in America, and indeed, the entire emerging world trapped in similar unsavoury situation.A remarkable work, which succinctly underscores the clarion call for justice and compensation for all the black victims of centuries of blatant and systematic practices of heinous slavery and odious racism in America.The body of work parades an impressive array of documented evidence that, relentlessly, obliterates any escape route for any shamelessly flighty revisionists and or obscurantists.Thankfully, just as Truth has proven to be stubbornly constant, this author will be proven to be forever truthful in almost all conclusions. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Money and Capitalism *by on Reviewed in the United States September 28, 2023* The book is great reading. The author Mehrsa Baradaran has done extensive research and put her legal knowledge to good use. After all she is a law professor at University Of California, Irvine her area of expertise is banking law. Race and racial issues, socioeconomic conditions evolving around money, politics capitalism, and so forth are integral factors in this book. This book should be required reading for college students, mandatory reading for everyone who wants America to share the wealth. When I read a review by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I was hooked so I went out and purchased the book. If you are an advocate of social justice and you want real reforms in your community then read this book, it should be a book that is included in your bookshelf collection. Finally when you hear African Americans talk about Black Wall Street—Tulsa Oklahoma 1921 destruction of the Black community by White folk angry at the mega success of this community back then—you can understand the intellectual dynamics Mehrsa Baradaran shares as she explains and teaches America in a scholarly way about the her book. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.sn/products/47398165-the-color-of-money-black-banks-and-the-racial-wealth](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/47398165-the-color-of-money-black-banks-and-the-racial-wealth) --- *Product available on Desertcart Senegal* *Store origin: SN* *Last updated: 2026-09-18*