The Racial Wealth Gap
A Brief History
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 3 Feb 2026
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A concise history that uncovers the roots of this most pernicious American divide and makes an urgent call for reparations.
Why has the racial wealth gap between the median white households and median Black households remained stagnant over the past century, never narrowing below six to one? Leading expert on race and financial equality Mehrsa Baradaran attempts to answer this question in this sweeping yet accessible history. She shows how decades of the laws rooted in white supremacy—from slavery and the broken Reconstruction-era promise of “40 acres and a mule,” to the racist policies of the Jim Crow and New Deal eras—have restricted Black access to capital, credit, homeownership, and other mechanisms of wealth creation while subsidizing the rising economic fortunes of white families.
In The Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran outlines two tectonic forces that have driven apart the economic fortunes of white and Black families: wealth creation for white Americans, who have been systematically receiving financial subsidies in the century and a half since emancipation, and wealth destruction for Black Americans—either by vigilante violence or by official means, such as allowing Black banks to collapse or building highways through segregated Black communities. These forces, combined with the racist notion that Black communities fail to rise because of their own moral, intellectual, or economic shortcomings, have kept Black families behind their white counterparts, despite decades of civil rights activism and national economic growth—a deep injustice that can only be achieved through reparations.
An infuriating and compelling read, The Racial Wealth Gap offers a devastating analysis of one of America’s most pressing systemic issues.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
