Overview

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 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.

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Mehrsa Baradaran is a law professor at University of California, Irvine, and the acclaimed author of The Quiet Coup, The Color of Money, and How the Other Half Banks. She lives in Irvine, California. Soneela Nankani is the award-winning narrator of over 300 titles in many different genres, including young adult, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, and nonfiction. A recipient of AudioFile magazine's Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Honor, she has garnered sixteen Earphones awards as well as nominations for Audie and SOVAS awards. Her audiobooks have been featured in Best Audiobooks lists by AudioFile and the Washington Post, among others. In her spare time, she loves to read (yes, really), learn languages, try new recipes, and travel. She lives in the DC area with her husband and two mischievous daughters.

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