Why we haven't fixed the racial wealth gap

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1:00stages? Find Birth of a Parent wherever you get your podcasts. It's true that money cannot buy happiness, at least not directly. But it can buy decent food and housing and healthcare. It can enable a quality education and it can allow you to buy your way out of car trouble and rent increases and seasonally high utility bills. The thing is, in the United States, your odds of having enough money to take good care of yourself and your family are affected by your race. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. The gap in average household wealth between white and black American homes has been apparent for as long as anybody has been tracking it. And my guest has a pretty stunning assessment of why it has persisted even though the solutions are fairly obvious. She says the workings of capitalism did not require black people to be poor, but American

2:02politics did. Marissa Barataran is Professor of Law at the University of California Irvine and author of the Racial Wealth gap of brief history. Marissa, welcome to Think. Thank you so much for having me, Wooden Honor. Let's start by making sure we all know what we're talking about here. What does the racial wealth gap refer to? It's a number, it's a statistic of wealth that usually you can track it between the medium or mean average, black family versus white family and across the income spectrum, what you see is so high income. The wealth of a black family compared to a white family is something like 12 to 1 or 1 to 12. On the income ladder, it sticks, but also the higher incomes, the higher the wealth gap. And this is a number that is sticky through time. It has not changed since the dawn of the Civil War.

3:04It made sense back then as you had people being free from enslavement into freedom, but it hasn't budged. And there's many, many factors that have caused that, but it's a number that is just a background statistic, but it's effects are very present in all of the things that we see in racial inequality, what neighborhood you live in, what schools, the opportunity ladders, policing, all of that stuff is I think symptoms of this great divide between white America and black America. There are numerous racial groups in this country with different average amounts of wealth. For purposes of this discussion, we're comparing the wealth of black and white Americans. Why was that the focus of this book? I started, you know, my research into the racial wealth gap, not intending actually to write about that. I wanted to write about black owned banks and sort of what they showed about banking in general,

4:10which is that banking is a government slash private enterprise that really kind of challenges these myths that we have about market freedom being separate from the government. Banks are very much entangled with the government and the policies that the government makes really affect how banks operate and how people gain wealth in this country. And so I wanted to show how policies of racial exclusion over time, so, you know, including the New Deal, the homestead acts, all of these pivot points in American history where the federal government in tandem with the market created wealth, but explicitly left out black Americans, how that would show up in the banking sector, in the financial lives of black businesses, black banks, and black families. And then it became just like a larger story to explain, you know, we talk a lot about

5:11like systemic racism, right? And what I'm showing is the system, the infrastructure, the credit, the background noise of racism, that has nothing to do with what people feel in their hearts toward other people or, you know, animosity. It just takes the feelings out of it. It takes the humans out of it. It just shows the systemic causes and how these systems perpetuate these patterns without any means of solving them until we really look at this system, which is what I'm trying to do in the books that I've written about this. We will talk specifically about banks in this conversation. I do want to know for folks, wealth sounds like it only represents like some dollar figure that we have in a bank. But of course, it has to do with opportunity and health and income and housing and other things. Wealth is like the difference between a decent quality of life and a substandard one in many cases. It is where, what is your neighborhood, you know, what kind of schools do you go to, the

6:16social capital, who, you know, what kind of resources that you can access in terms of like are there professionals in your neighborhood, the policing environmental hazards, you know, the political power. It has everything to do with, you know, your surrounding circumstances. So it's a number, but it's a really misleading statistic. I mean, it shows a lot, but it doesn't show everything in that, like it really is about, you know, the fact that we've never really fixed segregation patterns. In this country, black neighborhoods, like the homes in black neighborhoods have lower values because they are in black neighborhoods. And that's been a constant through time. And so this wealth gap is this place where racism really works to just heightened financial risk, you know, so where, where are the payday in Limters? Where are the check cashews? Where are people paying the most in interest? Where are they paying the highest in mortgages?

7:16Where do banks and financial firms go when they have the predatory products, like we saw in the financial crisis in any sort of credit card or banking scam? And then where do they close banking branches? You know, this is a redlining, you know, for many centuries, it just wasn't access. And so it's a whole structure that is, you know, revealed by this number of the wealth gap. And wealth is just very different than income and that income, you know, in one lifetime, you can earn a high income. But wealth is something that's really sticky. It's kind of passed down generationally. So it's like, did your grandparents, you know, own a home or were they not allowed to own a home for racial covenants? And we're not talking about, you know, we're talking about grandparents here or parents. We had racial covenants in this country, meaning you could not sell a house to anyone who was not at the Caucasian race. These were enforced into the 1970s. We had FHA loans.

8:17This is the government backing mortgages only to white neighborhoods, this again, until the mid 1960s, until the Civil Rights Act came into being. And so, you know, if your grandparents were, you know, living in poverty and it's, you're paying rent, you're paying high interest in everything. And you're not able to accumulate wealth. So you don't have that, you know, basement apartment where you can stay, you know, there's no financial buffer. There's no one helping you pay for school. There isn't that just soft landing that many white, white families have. And it doesn't feel like privilege. I think a lot of people will say, well, I'm not rich, but just owning a home, you know, gives a certain stability and a certain opportunities that not owning a home for generations doesn't. A minute ago, you mentioned Merissa, lower property values in majority black neighborhoods. And I'd bring this up because there's an analysis in this book about white flight and it's

9:21after effects that I haven't seen often before. It was often initiated by white people who like, did not want to live near black people, feared their property values would decline. Property values did decline as black people moved into places, but because that was because white people who enjoyed a whole lot of different kinds of government support were no longer there to receive that support and benefit the entire neighborhood. That is a fascinating way to look at this. Absolutely. I mean, it had everything to do. You have in that era of upward migration to the north as the south lost a lot of the black population. And there was this massive migration to the north. There was a lot of violence. So black families would move, these are doctors and lawyers and black professionals would move into a neighborhood and then they would get bombs in their houses and men with guns and really threatening violence to get them out of the neighborhood.

10:26And then you saw if there's like two to five percent of the neighborhood turned black, the rest of the neighbors would flee. It was like this pattern of white flight and then the property values would plummet. And it wasn't necessarily with racial animosity and racism, but it was also you could see that the housing values plummet as soon as it turned into a black neighborhood. And it's a really interesting dynamic. And then banks of course are not lending into black neighborhoods. And then the federal government really frustrated this whole pattern by once the new deal was created after the Great Depression where everyone basically got a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. There was no such thing before then. A black families were explicitly excluded. And these neighborhoods that had become, that were these zones of like turnover or mixed kind of, you know, races were specifically given this red distinction where banks could

11:26not lend there because there was a racial mix of people. So race became the number one indicator of financial risk. And these were, you know, back in the 30s, but then that stayed and really created these pockets of poverty across the nation that have largely gone unchanged, which is why I'm writing this book to pay attention to this stuff because it's not, you can't just end discrimination after hundreds of years of legally enforced government backed credit and wealth and job discrimination and then just roll that back but then leave those segregated spaces, leave this racial wealth gap and say, okay, well, capitalism will fix it. Well, capitalism didn't create it. The state created it through legal means and it's impossible for capitalism to fix it. That's sort of what I'm showing in the book is look at how these banks are trying to lend. You cannot grow capital where there isn't any capital.

12:29And that goes to the larger point of that's not how banks work. A lot of money creation comes from the federal government. And if the federal government is choosing policies that leave out black populations and this is the other point of the book, why are they choosing those policies? They're choosing those policies because they're politically expedient because race baiting and fueling racial animosity is a means to power. You remind us that pretty much the only tangible remnant left after the failure of reconstruction was this bank that had been established for black people. Tell us about the Friedman savings and trust company. So, you know, right, this is right as the slaves are being freed. The promise, you know, that many of the union leaders Sherman and Lincoln and others had made was that they would get, you know, land, right? After, first of all, the Southerners had like treasonously seceded and had, you know, held these slaves and as a North defeated the South, there was for a moment this opportunity

13:32to parcel out these Southern plantations and give land to the former slaves. And that plan was quickly, you know, rejected. You know, Lincoln is assassinated and sort of white supremacist Johnson comes in and says, you know, this is a white man's government. And also it was the needs of the cotton market, the cotton market needed cotton to be grown cheap. And if black people own land, they wouldn't grow as much cotton and the prices would go up. And the cotton industry would suffer and people would lose profits. So instead, you know, there's all this rhetoric of well capitalism. You can rely on capitalism. Mind you, this is right after, you know, the slaves are freed. So there's no, you know, there's no stored wealth. There's no access. And then, you know, this is a little bit before the clan and Jim Crow. So there's not going to be any freedom. And they're told, okay, well, instead of having land given to you because that's anti-capitalists, you know, you know, to be lectured on capitalism after having been held in bondage for hundreds of years,

14:38you know, that was not capitalism is rich irony. But you see this irony over and over again in the treatment of African-Americans by the state. So before the break, you were telling us about the Friedman's savings and trust company. What limited the ability of that bank to actually help black people build and grow businesses, get themselves established in the economy? It was basically a glorified piggy bank. It was not a bank that was going to lend. It was, you know, just a savings bank. And what ended up happening is, you know, a lot of black men and women trusted the bank with their savings. So this was, you know, instead of getting land, you get this bank. And supposedly, you know, it was, it was backed by the federal government. I mean, Lincoln signed it into law in Congress and, you know, endorsed it. And it was all these like philanthropists and not profit leaders saying, yes, let's help these Friedman, you know, get on their feet. And so they trusted the bank with their money. And so, you know, people in dire conditions of sharecropping were saving money to buy property.

15:44And put their money in this bank. And the banks budget grew to like, you know, 1.5 billion dollars in today's money. A lot of savings, a lot of money. Mind you, they weren't lending on this. So there wasn't wealth creation. It was just supposed to be a safe place to store your money as the South was. Sort of radicalized and violent. You couldn't really go to a Southern bank to save money. They would, you know, not, not allow it. So this 1.5 billion dollars was like too much for the white managers to sort of resist. Speculating with. And so what happened was that the white manager of the bank Henry Cook, his whose brother was Jay Cook of infamous sort of railroad bonds trader took this money and invested it in speculative railroad bonds and lost it. So it just went away and the government did nothing to back it. You know, there was no FDIC insurance at the time. The government did nothing to restore the savings. And it really struck a blow into the entire black community.

16:45And their trust of both the government and the banking sector for, you know, generations. So black people during and after reconstruction learned and also knew better than to wait around for government programs to fix the problems that government programs had created. Talk about mutual aid societies and how they functioned in communities at the time. So in in heavy Jim Crow era, there were social clubs and funerals. Anything anything that the black community needed to do, they had to do outside of the white community. And so there was, you know, a lot of mutual aid societies that were formed during this time. You know, social, again, social clubs, schools, insurance funds, you know, funeral funds and banks, you know, to pool money and to lend. And so the first sort of black banks were created in this moment and they were like mutual

17:47savings banks. And you saw this in the north and other immigrant communities as well as they were being left out of the mainstream banking sector. They would kind of join forces and create these like pockets of cooperation outside of the mainstream system. How did different black leaders imagine like different potential routes out of poverty, either through full integration economically and socially or like a segregated but fully functional black economic system? Yeah, so the two sort of names that come up here are, you know, Bookley Washington and W.E.B. DeBoys. Although I think that, you know, their debate at this moment of time has been over, overdone and DeBoys is just a very, very prolific and rich, rich scholar. But Bookley Washington did have this idea that, you know, segregated economies were just fine and that black men and women would gather wealth and pull their resources together. And segregation

18:49did not need to change. They did not need political rights in order to gain wealth and that the wealth would earn them political rights. And so this is the basis of like, you know, the black business, black capitalism sort of at this time. And DeBoys, you know, also supported black business and, you know, wrote the most about, you know, tracking black businesses, but kind of saw a bigger picture that you could not get economic power without political power. And that if, you know, you got and I think history bore this out in that in the places where black men and women had economic powers, like Tulsa, Wilmington, Durham. And they got, you know, even sometimes more economic power than the white majority. There were, there was violence. I mean, Tulsa, there were, you know, bombs and raids of black homes and a real sort of like terrorism that displaced the entire greenwood black community. They had a very wealthy society there. Wilmington, the same thing,

19:53you saw it across Georgia and, and then individual cases of black men, you know, as women couldn't own property at the time. But black men who got a patent or own property getting lynched by the plan, you know, and so it and not being able to protect themselves with a law, property law and contract law. So, so it is, you know, I think DeBoys has indicated in this argument that without political power, economic power is meaningless because you need law to protect property. And insofar as the law is working against you, your property rights are meaningless. You cannot accumulate wealth. And I think that that that is the lesson that I'm showing also in the book over time, you know, you look at the financial crisis and as the banks failed, you know, they were restored to full profits and many people lost their homes. But the black community lost 53% of their wealth in one single blow. And they were forced the most targeted by these

20:56news stories, predatory, subprime loans, where these banks, you know, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America is very like, you know, lots of evidence and data on this that they would target these segregated black spaces that have been deprived of mortgage loans for 100 years. And here come Wall Street now, once these subprime loans become profitable to really target these neighborhoods and sell their worst loans to people who could have, you know, qualified for, you know, the 30-year fixed rate mortgages were sold the worst loans. Remind us what the Community Reinvestment Act was meant to do. The Community Investment Act was passed in 1977 and it is supposed to, you know, reverse this history of redlining or at least not permitted anymore. Redlining was this practice of banks not opening branches in black communities, just not lending into black communities. And and that had been, you know, forever. And in 1977, you know, William Proxmire, the Banking Committee

22:01passes a CRA, which, which doesn't force banks to lend into black communities, but does say that if you are a bank in a locality, you must show that you're not avoiding black communities. It's a real low bar that, you know, 99% of banks just passed, you know, but it was something. And it it's really funny because even despite its like toothlessness and really, you know, in effect, in effectiveness, it actually creating wealth in black communities, it laws like that, you know, because it's like a DEI law, apparently, you know, that was blamed by some some on the right for the financial crisis. Oh, you forced banks to lend into these communities. It's kind of a funny argument because the banks were going into these communities with predatory loads making a crap ton of money. And yeah, but instead the CRAs blamed because, oh, black communities are

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25:03the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odo at odo.com. That's odo.com. Debates over the gold standard versus fiat currency can get like terrifyingly wonky but talk about how those affected black prospects, economic prospects around the late 19th century. Well, I mean, the gold standard debate has is an ongoing one since the founding and it's more complicated than I think probably the black white racial wealth gap. It's a real, it was a imposing the gold standard on the economy was a price that the lowest income people made

26:10in that it constricted credit and it favored those who had wealth. It was like a British standard. It also hampered American policymaking and fixed it to this former empire that was then the the biggest power in the world. So there's many debates about this and it you know, Lincoln during the civil war issued the first fiat currency that was national in America and that allowed him to feed the soldiers and and and when the war and that became like incredibly controversial after. But the debate itself really kind of exposes this interesting truth about money which is you know, you can a government can create does create money. It doesn't need to rely on gold. Gold was like a fixed standard that was chosen, you know, I think at random at some

27:11point because it had you know, like really interesting qualities and and and seems to be like this forever commodity and and yet, you know, fiat currency allows much more flexibility and much more ability for government to do social policy that that kind of benefits more people and and gold is like that, you know, much more austerity and and scarcity and so so this debate tracked a little bit, you know, especially post civil war where people who favored gold also favored the, you know, fixed nature of race and you know, position in society and hierarchy and people who favored fiat allowed for a bit more flexibility in in understanding that the market and the state were kind of entangled and could expand kind of together and for mutual benefit. And so we've been

28:13in this ongoing debate in this country for a while, it's not gold so much but it's like what what should society spend money on and where does this money come from? And I think there's just a lot of confusion, a lot of confused debates about how money is created for what purpose, where should we spend it and what we are spending it on. I think a lot of people are get focused on while we, you know, the only government spending that they see is like on welfare or spending for the poor and that is just like a drop in the bucket of government spending where so much of it goes to like support, you know, big financial giants and big industries and these tax breaks for these the, you know, billionaires and corporations and then, you know, military spending and a lot of just spending that doesn't come back into, you know, building a nation. There's a how and for how long did the federal housing administration guidelines

29:15explicitly enforce racial segregation? The New Deal, you know, legislation was pasted in the 1930s and very explicitly enforced racial segregation from the 1930s until the 1970s up until like the late 60s and 70s and, you know, on top of that, there were racial covenants that were, you know, mandatory in any home purchase during that time. But before then, also there was, you know, segregation that was, you know, this is the Jim Crow era in the south and then in the north, you know, segregation patterns and forced by cities and states and violence and private contracting. So segregation has been a pattern for a long time and yeah, so those federal standards came into being in the New Deal when the federal government created, you know, federally subsidized mortgage loan.

30:17How did it happen that what started as the war on poverty turned into the war on crime? Well, you know, Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson after the Civil Rights Act, understood that you can't just, you know, deregulate Jim Crow, which was what the Civil Rights Act were. It was like a massive deregulation of laws imposed to keep black and white people separate, to back of the bus, you know, kind of standards, you know, separate schools and all this stuff. And the Civil Rights Act said, you know, we don't want, we can't have those laws anymore. But there was this other step of like, okay, now how do you remedy, you know, when we talk about, you know, legal wrongs being done to people, you've got to talk about a remedy. How do you fix it? So some of the fixes were, you know, housing integration and just, you know, offering loans now that we're not offered during that, all that time of white wealth building that had created a wealthy white suburbs around the black

31:21ghettos, right? And the two different credit structures and the two different interest rate structures, all of that. And so the war on poverty was one part of that, that process to build up wealth in these communities. It was a small part, you know, the better parts would have been the mortgage loans and that real kind of efforts at building wealth rather than just aiding poverty. But the program starts in the Johnson administration, but you know, Johnson is much more interested in Vietnam at the time isn't really putting a lot of money in there. And the Nixon comes in and uses basically all the resources that were meant to fight poverty and beef up police departments and really starts a war on crime, which isn't, isn't the snowmer because it is actually just a war on black communities. It starts, you know, the mass incarceration of black men and the drug wars, you know, where they criminalized a lot of you to petty offenses. There are people serving, you know,

32:28life sentences and prison for petty credit, you know, things like marijuana that just, you know, were only black communities were targeted by these criminal laws, where new laws were being written, high real high sentences, and then black communities only are being targeted. And this is very clear in the Nixon memos and the testimonies of his AIDS that it wasn't about the drugs, you know, there's a John Alrichman quote that I start in one of my books where it talks about, you know, the Nixon White House was, it was just trying to do anti-black and, you know, anti sort of like, you know, student protest or messaging and they associated them with drug, drug addicts and then went after them with these drug laws and, you know, he's saying, what did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did, you know, but they had these two enemies and they wanted to suppress them. It's a little bit similar to what we're seeing with

33:31the ice, you know, you have an enemy that is, you know, identified by a politician, it's the immigrants that are coming over and that's these are the bad guys, the criminals, you see, you've got a criminalization of a whole population and then you're sending in targeted police to terrorize these communities and for political purpose and that political purpose is, you know, to gain power. Mercia, we were talking about Nixon. He was among those who posited that racial injustice in the US was the natural using air quotes, their result of free markets and then bizarrely he and others insisted that markets must also hold the solution. Will you explain the ideas behind the promotion of black capitalism, which sounds like not a bad thing necessarily? Yeah, yeah, so Nixon was a brilliant political rhetorician and he is, you know, in this place as he's getting elected where the civil

34:32rights laws have been passed and they're pretty popular. There is some white backlash and he makes a strategic calculation that he needs the South to win presidency. So Nixon, you know, needs to win the South and the George Wallace voters and George Wallace is the segregation now segregation forever guy and he also needs not to not alienate this sort of business Republican community that is not anti-civil rights and so he needs to have a message of civil rights that is basically we're not doing anything and these are all very clear in the memos. I'm not putting words into his mouth. He's saying these things, you know, he's saying I'm going to lay off the pro Negro crap. This is Nixon and you know, send an anti-black message but not overt and so he brings in, you know, his advisors or you know, Pat, Pat Buchanan and Alan Greenspan, who you know brings in this like libertarian capitalist message that is the way to deal with urban poverty is to do nothing

35:40because capitalism will fix it and so Nixon's whole campaign on civil rights becomes, you know, forget civil rights. He writes in one of his speeches, we're now talking about black capitalism and black capitalism essentially is basically nothing that the government will do nothing and capitalism will fix it and Nixon also creates the program of affirmative action where he asks certain companies to just hire a few black workers and have quotas and quotas are unpopular of course but you know, then he, you know, just asks for voluntary hiring requirements and creates his bureaucracy to enforce affirmative action but really it's nothing. Nothing happens. There's no integration. There's no money being spent, you know, his political opponent, Hubert Humphrey says, you know, talking about black capitalism without capital is, you know, like it's a scam and it is a scam. It's a rhetorical detours like a pivot. It's a slight of hand away from what was the possibility for real reform and

36:43so it seems like something is being done because there's all of this attention being paid to these affirmative action programs but actually nothing is being done and capitalism is being sort of weaponized as rhetoric against these demands for justice. In the book you explain that the problem with affirmative action and now DEI which is three letters treated like a four letter word in certain circles is that these things have not worked particularly well to address the root causes of the racial wealth gap if that's the intention or part of the intention but they have contributed to the perception that members of marginalized groups enjoy all kinds of special treatment. Yeah, I mean, I think Nixon also very clearly, I mean, you know, keep bringing it Nixon but he's very important figure in American politics, a brilliant political tactician and his playbook sort of on, you know, the Southern strategy is still in use today. It's sort of dog whistling on

37:46brace and so Nixon, yeah, is a very brilliant tactician here and understands his purpose and, you know, the Southern strategy was still being followed by the Republican Party and he understands very well that affirmative action is going to be controversial and again, in the memos, it's very clear that they do this on purpose to break apart these left-wing coalitions specifically labor unions and the civil rights movement through affirmative action. It's a way of seeming like, you know, there's a scarcity of jobs and, you know, you're fighting for them, the union guys and the black and the, you know, black workers and affirmative action feels like it's special treatment to black people and so he's able to pick off this, you know, the poor white working class or say white working class from the black working class, which is his point,

38:51you know, which is what he wants to do and, you know, the same with the busing debates, right, where, you know, where he's race baiting against busing and all of this stuff and it's part of the the strategy that Nixon uses here and and it's also, yeah, it feels, it fuels a lot of Republican talking points on special treatment, right? It's really interesting to see the parallels that, you know, were happening during reconstruction after reconstruction where, you know, this idea that black men and women freed slaves would get land was like, oh, well, you can't get special treatment from the government, you know, this is like right after bonded and the same thing here is his right after Jim Crow, right after the, you know, white only schools and and spaces were no longer able to be that way that now we're talking about special treatment for black people, you know, just to get a few jobs and companies that they were strictly prohibited from, from applying to and

39:53schools that they were not able to enter all of a sudden it's special treatment to reserve a few spots for them, but that cultural war phenomenon has continued to time. It makes it seem like something is being done here to remedy a history of racial discrimination where actually nothing is being done. No, no benefits are accruing no one in the civil rights coalition lobbied for affirmative action. This was a Nixon pivot. Nothing that doesn't help, it certainly does. I mean, it does something. It allows for people to enter schools and jobs that they were otherwise discriminated from entering, but it does a lot of political work to, you know, you know, engender like a racial animus from specifically the people who the right has used as a coalition and the left to the left certainly, you know, uses racial animosity to build coalitions. It's not

40:59just a right-wing strategy, but it was a Nixonian playbook. Before Richard Nixon ever took the White House, we had President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the Karner Commission report, remind us of what that was, what was in it, what it recommended and what became of it. Yeah, the Karner Commission report is like the closest America has ever come to something like a truth and reconciliation, sort of admitting the wrongs, you know, sort of we ended slavery and then just didn't really talk about it. It just kind of back to business as usual. I took a war to do, but there wasn't like a remedy. Let's fix what we did, you know, let's let's bring people up to speed and and and offer remedies, right? Damages for years of bondage. That did not happen. And then the same list of rights laws, like we just end Jim Crow and separate but equal, you know, laws and don't really do anything. And Johnson though did try to really kind of reckon with like this

42:01history of discrimination and calls this commission together and auto-carners the head of it and the first draft of the Karner Commission report, the title was like the harvest of racism. It really showed like the bleak bleak numbers, you know, the racial wealth gap was in there, the policing, you know, and and the report is very, very direct in that we live in two countries and white societies implicated in the creation of the ghetto that white laws, white institutions created it and that the policing system, you know, we have a garrison state where police are deployed, you know, to terrorize black communities. It's it's it's a really sobering account. It's it's very popular also people want, you know, it's a hunger to understand it and, you know, Marlon Brando reads it on television and it sells out, you know, because it's a really thorough account and it's released in like 1968 and at that year, you know, Johnson basically

43:07resigns or says he's not running for reelection and it just ends that that's the last kind of conversation we have that is this honest reckoning with this history and then you're right into the Nixon era and so I think a lot of people look back at the civil rights era as like something was done, some, you know, we we we fixed racism, you know, and that that is also a purposeful story told by the Reagan administration, you know, first, you know, Marlon Brando the King is an enemy of the state and then he becomes this hero, but like cherry picked, you know, I have a dream speech rather than all of his speeches about how economic justice is required to have any justice, you know, the end of his life, he was doing still doing boycotts saying his dream had turned into a nightmare. This is not what we met. This is we're not done and but he sidelined not even invited to the White House anymore, Nixon, you know, calls him a domestic terrorist, Reagan really, you know, goes against him as governor and then all of a sudden, you know, 10 years later, you know,

44:11the civil rights movement has been basically quelled and, you know, he becomes this hero because we fixed racism, you know, we've we've we've done it and and so that that becomes the story that that is the one that we many people believe today. Merced, you have thoughts on whether anyone could structure something like a reparations program that could permanently address the racial wealth gap in this country. I think it would be not hard at all, you know, the practicalities aren't difficult. I mean, we've done it many, many times in history through the New Deal, it doesn't cost any money to actually create government structures that build wealth, government, you know, loans and credit programs and all of that is it's pretty easy. We've done it over and over again, but it's the political, the political is the biggest gap in that there is has been since

45:15Nixon since before that this idea that any benefits to that go to the black community to fix poverty or to remedy these past injustices are somehow taking away from white people that are that it's reverse discrimination rather than it's just, you know, social policy for everybody and it is it's it's true. I think we all pay a price to live and evacially segregate its society. We all pay a price in inequality and that is one of the big points of the racial wealth gap book is like we talk about the racial wealth gap, but the racism, the racial politicking allows for a wealth gap to be created between the rich and the poor of all races, especially now, you know, white poverty is never been higher, you know, you've got epidemics and, you know, and still I think people blame, you know, black people are immigrants for taking away their benefits and their jobs without really

46:16looking upwards at who who is actually restructuring the economy, who isn't paying taxes, who is taking away the jobs and it is it's the private equity firms, it's the banks, it's the same financial industry that has in tandem with the federal government really been sort of picking the pockets of Americans for many years, you know, these power elites to blame that unfairness on people at the bottom and then use the power of the state to punish them, like we're seeing right now rather than actually fix it, make it a fair market, make it a fair society. We should all be paying the same fair share of taxes. There shouldn't be, you know, monopolies ripping us off and and banks getting, you know, bailouts when people aren't getting bailouts, all of these these things that are more complex and more high level that are the real problem I think that is eroding our democracy and our trust in these institutions and the race is always coming in here

47:18as a scapegoat. What the fat cats even have much to lose if things were made fairer for everyone else in this country? I think the fat cats, yeah, they, you know, if fairness is, you know, you can have people with a trillion dollars in a democracy. That's that's it erodes equality. It's not that there's a scarcity of money. We can all just print money and give it to everybody, but I think the hoarding of money and privileges is, you know, the greed, the addiction that is this hoarding, I wouldn't continue if we had a fair free fair economy, right? Where everyone could compete, everybody could have the same opportunities. I think there are people who are opportunity hoarders and it's a very small minority and I don't actually think they would lose. I think, you know, you look at the way that these, you know, billionaires and private equity firms and live their lives, they live in fear of a mass uprising. I think they fear, you know,

48:23revolution more than I think many people at the bottom even are aware that we should be fighting, of fighting these people, but they understand that it's a looting. It's an unfair, unirred privilege that has passed down generationally. Merissa Barataran is professor of law at UC Irvine and author of the racial wealth gap of brief history. Merissa, thank you very much for making time to talk. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, your favorite podcast platform or think.ker.org. Again, I'm Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

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