Mehrsa Baradaran’s book teaches us that money has a color, an arresting proposition to fans and foes of capitalism alike. As she points out, economic orthodoxy posits that the transactional medium is itself a formal instrument: money expresses but does not affect the value of the substances it measures. Critics of that orthodoxy agree even…
In The Color of Money and in the opening post of this Symposium, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the notion that markets exist outside of political power. What she shows for credit policy, I have shown for housing policy, particularly in my book, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban…
By shedding historical light on the development and practices of black banking, Mehrsa Baradaran’s excellent and thought-provoking The Color of Money demystifies some fundamental free market myths and strongly cautions against the widespread faith, among policymakers and activists alike, in banking as a means of overcoming long-entrenched and worsening racial disparities in wealth. In this…
When I started research on the project that became The Color of Money, I wanted to write a book about racial disparities in access to credit. When I started digging into the history, I started to realize that there was a much bigger story here, one that undermined one of the most basic neoliberal myths…