On his episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that in order to convince him that white supremacy was over in America, we’d have to fix the 20-to-1 racial wealth gap. That disparity in wealth between black and white Americans is the subject of the third episode of Vox’s new Netflix show, Explained. One of the experts interviewed for that episode, Mehrsa Baradaran, also appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to talk about the historical causes and current implications of the racial wealth gap.
Baradaran has written two books on how American financial institutions benefit those with power, How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money. This conversation starts with an overview of the history of the racial wealth gap in America and covers the “Jim Crow credit market,” why we should bring back postal banking, and the differences in how America treats the opioid epidemic versus how we treated the crack epidemic. Baradaran points out, “When there’s a depression in…
