The racial wealth gap A brief history

Legal scholar Baradaran (The Quiet Coup) lays out a concise and erudite case that today's staggering racial wealth gap is the result of decades of carefully crafted government policy. She begins with slavery, "the scaffolding upon with the American economic system was constructed" and, in legal terms, the literal theft of wages. She goes on to show how the theft of Black wealth remained a core tenet of public policy after Emancipation. Particularly damning examples include the government's history of suppression of successful Black-owned banks, as well as the myriad ways in which white people have been beneficiaries of government-provided safety nets, subsidies, land grants, and legal favoritism. At the same time, Baradaran notes that America's systemic theft of Black wealth ultimately hurts all average Americans, as it mainly functions to funnel money into the hands of the 1% and to stymie local economies. Baradaran's quietly furious prose deftly guides readers through the labyrinthine world of American monetary policy and financial history, with breathtaking moments of clarity striking like lightning, as when she notes that the massive amounts of money printed by the Fed to bail out banks during the Great Recession was "trillions more" than had ever been asked for reparations. Readers will be fired up. (Feb.)

Examining the historical roots of the wealth gap between white and non-white Americans. In the late 1960s, the Kerner Commission reported that despite apparent progress in civil rights, America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." It recommended that the U.S. government assist Black Americans in building the wealth that would put them on more equal footing with whites. But as UC Irvine law professor Baradaran argues, the neoliberal policies that took shape in the following decades only served to reinforce the wealth inequality that had existed from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. She contends that neoliberalism itself explains the gap as a "natural by-product of market forces" that can be overcome through "self-help solutions or local institutions." The reality, however, is far more pernicious, the author maintains: Analysis of American history reveals that the government actively subsidized white wealth while destroying attempts by Black people to amass their own capital. Early Reconstruction initiatives, for example, promised formerly enslaved people 40 acres of land to begin their lives only to confiscate that property and return it to Southern landowners; and during the Depression, Black-owned banks like the Binga State Bank in Illinois received no assistance when white-owned ones did. What minorities did receive was judgment from white-owned financial institutions that they were not qualified for loans because they were "entirely untutored in the business world" or possessed moral failings that made them unworthy. The result, which has only compounded over time, has been a tragic reenactment of what Martin Luther King Jr. identified as a situation where "America has given the Negro people a bad check" that perennially "come[s] back marked 'insufficient funds.'" As well-researched as it is disturbing, this book lays bare both the injustice and racist failings of a socioeconomic system. An important study that cogently argues the case for Black reparations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.