We pay more for these things than everyone else, right? We’re stuck in this trap of poverty and violence and crime and all of those things that come with poverty. We can’t even get buses to come into our neighborhoods to take us to work. So yes, these things are great, but the north is essentially saying, “Hey, let’s not celebrate quite yet.” For us, it’s not about the white water fountains and the Black water fountains. Blacks were always supposed to have the right to vote, or since the 15th Amendment.

Right? The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And they understand that these Civil Rights laws that are passed, and these are monumental reforms, a wonderful sort of advancement, although all they do actually is just give Blacks the rights that they were always entitled to. And what’s happening is these people in these communities that suffer from what I call the “Jim Crow Credit Market,” who pay more for everything, start to get very frustrated. What happens up north is what hasn’t been covered as much. What’s happening up north is even more important, I think, than what happens down south, because what happens down south is what we see. But really, there’s a lot happening across the nation. The southern Jim Crow and the clan and Bull Connor and all this stuff. What’s happening within the ghettos is that in tandem with the Civil Rights Movement, The Civil Rights Movement, as we remember it is very much about the Birmingham bus boycott and the Selma bridge.

Talk about the next compromise that happened, starting with the Nixon administration, but this idea of Black capitalism we’ve seen that’s continued to this day. So, it’s totally understandable and reasonable that African-Americans would want more control and more self-determination but this idea of Black capitalism and Black banks was resurrected by none other than Richard Nixon, as you detail in your book, and sort of co-opted. It’s sent out policy that’s destructive to African-Americans. The government has failed African-Americans. Material conditions for African-Americans have barely improved in some and in many ways. Of course, this is happening a century after the Civil War has ended. JAISAL NOOR: Going back to the historical thread we were following, you spend a lot of time in your book talking about the Civil Rights Movement and the demands for self-determination. Nixon’s embrace of ‘black capitalism,’ continues to this day while the roots of the racial wealth have never been addressed says Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia

The color of money by mehrsa baradaran