This book flushes out in great detail arguments you should have ready when your anti-black family members, friends and acquaintances casually say things like, "This is a good neighborhood, there are no blacks here," or "We came here with nothing, now look at how well we're doing. If blacks are poor, it must be their fault."
Baradaran examines different periods of USA history after the end of its civil war and abolition of slavery.** In each period, compensation to the enslaved peoples and their descendants is rejected in favor of half-measures which cost the state nothing and produce only symbolic and psychological benefits. And "half-measures" is hardly the right word in most instances. We need phrases such as quarter, eighth, one-sixteenth measures.
As importantly, the author shows how the state intervened and spent resources to assist whites during these periods.
The most common half-measure advanced by the USA government was banking. For a variety of reasons, including naked fraud in the original Freedmen's Bank and bias in administration of TARP funds in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, these measures did little to decrease the widening wealth gap between black and white Americans.
Capitalism won't reduce the wealth gap because racism continues to this day to make living while black more expensive and precarious and government policy continues to benefit whites. There's all kinds of ways to say this, but the one which comes to my mind the most having grown up in Georgia is "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken [expletive]."
Banking multiplies money among people where investments are profitable. USA segregation always means that the most profitable investments are among white people. Until segregation ends, the most accurate mode of analysis of black poverty in the USA is analyzing poverty in colonized nations.
This book does a wonderful job of taking an axe to cultural explanations of the wealth gap (although not as wittily as Oscar Wilde.) Whether it be Jared Kushner or Mitt Romney talking about Palestinians or your Uncle Know-Nothing-Who-Is-Proud-He-Doesn't-Read, cultural explanations are just ways of saying that I won't sacrifice any comfort to ensure you have economic security.
For those whose family histories included recent migration to the USA and who hold anti-black beliefs, think about despised groups in the countries of your ancestry and the restrictions and hurdles individuals from these groups face in economic and social advancement. I don't know of any scholarly literature on this, but I challenge anyone to produce a long list of groups who have faced more systematized repression and exclusion than black Americans.
Many African-American leaders have promoted black capitalism, particularly black-owned banks. While some may have believed that it would result in equality, many promoted black capitalism and civil rights and changing anti-black policies and reparations. While outside of the book's purpose, the inevitable conclusion after reading this book is that, without progress on all these fronts, the racial wealth gap in the USA will only increase.
Aside from the materials I've reviewed that I've labeled racism, you might also want to read Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which explains why poor people, particularly black Americans, pay relatively high prices for the substandard housing in which they are forced to live. Also, check out Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. In another blog, I shared how my auto insurance premium increased when I moved into an area of Indianapolis with a higher percentage of black people.
*This is how I remember hearing about the book. Can anybody confirm that the movie mentions it?
**Watch the movie 13th if you believe the USA has abolished slavery.
P.S. Check out the Minnesota Public Broadcasting Service documentary Jim Crow of the North. It's available on YouTube. It brings to video the work of the Mapping Prejudice project.
