This month, the Housing Book Club is discussing The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran.
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.
eso won books | better world books | ebay (in case everywhere is backordered)
Please RSVP below for the Zoom link!
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A few people asked for a list of what we've read so far, so here goes:
3. Social housing policy paper: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf
4. Evicted
5. Communities over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives to an Unjust Housing System
6. The Death and Life of the Single Family Home
7. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership