 Please, we'll go ahead and get started with our book event this afternoon. Again, I want to welcome you to EPI. Thank you for coming out on this Friday in the middle of the summer. We are absolutely thrilled that so many of you are here to listen to Marisa talk about her book, The Color of Money, Black Banks, and the Racial Wealth Gap. My name is Valerie Wilson. I'm director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy here at EPI. And Marisa and I had the opportunity to meet in the spring of this year. We were on a panel together at another conference. She gave her presentation, and I was sitting there thinking, I have to get her to come to EPI. I think there was something else that was scheduled that afternoon, so she had to run out. And I was like, I didn't get to catch her after the event. But I did a little sleuthing and figured out how to get in touch with her. And since that time, we've been trying to coordinate when we could get her to come to EPI and give this book talk. So I am absolutely thrilled that things worked out. Since then, she has changed jobs. So some of the information we sent said the University of Georgia. But Marisa is actually a professor at law at the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Robert Cotton Alston Chair in corporate law and associate dean for strategic initiatives with a focus on diversity and inclusion efforts at the University of Georgia law. Today, she's going to talk to us about the color of law. I mean, color of money. Sorry. There's another EPI-affiliated book called the color of law that I'm sure many of you are aware of as well. The color of money was awarded the best book of the year by the Urban Affairs Association, the Pro's Award, Honorable Mention in the Business, Finance, and Management category. And she was also selected as the finalist at the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards for the book in the category of History and Biography. With no further delays, I am going to turn the program over to our speaker for this afternoon, Marisa Baradaran. Thank you. I should mention that color of money and color of law came out like the same month. And we didn't know the other was writing it. And so his is a bestseller. So I think I get some sales because people are trying to buy the color of law. And they accidentally buy mine. So that's nice. So I want to talk about the racial wealth gap. And I want to do it through looking at banks. But the racial wealth gap is massive, and it doesn't change 1.5%. That's to say that our policy efforts that are eradicating the wealth gaps, such as they are, is total failure is an understatement. But I think hopefully as I go through this history, we'll understand why this gap hasn't budged. So I want to look at the role of credit policies, economic theories, and banks in creating and perpetuating the wealth gap. And I think it's some of the myths that we tell about markets that present the biggest obstacles to closing the racial wealth gap and achieving economic justice. And some of those myths were purposefully created. And I'll talk about some of those. For example, the promise that free market capitalism doesn't discriminate, that free markets offer equal opportunity for all just based on their skill and ability to produce. Yet, of course, history reveals that markets do discriminate, or alternatively, that the American economy has never borne any resemblance to a free market. For most of our history, blacks have been excluded from occupations, schools, neighborhoods, trades. Their property was not protected by law or contract at certain points in time. And in each historical moment when wealth was being created, whether it was through the Homestead Acts, through FHA mortgage credits, or the GI Bill, black communities were shut out of this wealth accumulation. And it wasn't an accident. Moreover, and this is where I focus on the banking in my book, is at certain pivot points in history, specifically during Reconstruction and during the Civil Rights era, where black communities are demanding state intervention and capital to remedy past wrongs. The rhetoric of free market capitalism is used as a weapon to cut down these claims. And instead of real reform, black communities are offered self-help markets, segregated banks, and businesses. In other words, leaders in the power structure maintaining the dominance of these white market institutions promised that markets would fix the problems that had been created by law backed by violence. So in the quick history that follows, I want to demonstrate that insofar as these lovers of power were held by a white intent on enforcing a race-based economy, markets would perpetually block capital accumulation. So I want to start with Reconstruction. I'm going to skip that. During Reconstruction, the freedmen were expected. This is actual Southern currency during the war. So it had the image of black slaves on it, because the entire Southern economy was based on the capital of not just the labor of slavery, but the capital of slaves. So slaves were put on balance sheets. Their bodies were monetized. And then you could use that capital like you would any property that you have now as leverage, as collateral, to get more credit and to get more wealth. And so even as the institution of slavery was eradicated, a lot of that wealth lingered. Even despite the destruction of Reconstruction, as we've been told, supposedly wiped out the Southern economy, a lot of that wealth stays. But during Emancipation and Reconstruction, the freedmen were expected to transition from being capital to being capitalists. Freedmen and their abolitionist allies during that time of Reconstruction demanded land as a form of reparations. Or alternatively, as many in the North would have it as punishment to the treasonous Southerners who had fought this war and lost. Without land, abolitionists and their allies said that justice would be meaningless, and participation in capitalism would be a farce. Because without land, without property, you actually don't have freedom to own your own labor and the wealth that it produces. President Johnson vetoed the land grant and the freedmen's bill after some time, except for one provision that I'll come back to. And the reasoning he used in his Johnson's veto is that freedmen would be protected by free markets and contract law, that they would just bargain for fair wages and buy their own land. This was either unbelievably naive or incredibly cynical. The Southern economy was nothing like a free market, especially after the Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction. Whites refused to sell property to blacks. Southern legislators, lawyers, and judges, we're not talking about the Klan. We're talking about actual legitimate courts and the jurisprudence of the South. They governed every aspect of black labor. They restricted blacks from skill trades. Vagrancy laws were prevalent. So if you were caught not working, you were sent without due process to prison, and then you would be sold into convict labor, where you would essentially and ultimately die in those camps. Wages were capped by law and by cabal by employers. So you actually couldn't bargain for your wages through contract law. And the violations, of course, were prosecuted without due process. So by the end of Reconstruction, most freedmen were left landless, voteless, and with practically every profession blocked to them, their only choice was to grow cotton through a sharecropping arrangement. Of course, this was the point. The worldwide cotton markets was, by that point, reliant on lots of southern exports in cotton. And the traders in the North and in Liverpool were very nervous that their supply would be cut down. And so they were communicating to each other and very worried about what would happen if the freedmen got land, because they were worried about what happened in Haiti. And what happened in Haiti is that after the Haitian Revolution, the freedmen got their land. And what do you grow when you have land? You don't grow debt and slavery produce. You don't grow sugar or cotton. You grow subsistence crops. You grow things to feed your family and then maybe a little bit of a cash crop. And so this was the worry. And this was actually what was happening in the South. As certain freedmen got land, they started to diversify, which is what any smart landowner would do. But of course, this would mean that the cotton supply would go down. And if the supply goes down, the prices go up. And people were going to have to pay more for cotton, and so the labor system was quickly changed. And so they couldn't get land. In the meantime, the federal government was actively providing free land to homesteaders and to railroads for private expansion. So this was big government land giving. But of course, Johnson explained not just the free market explanations, but when he vetoed the bill, he said, this is a white man's government. And this, so instead of getting land, the freed slaves got a bank in 1865. So Union General Oliver Otis Howard, this is the guy that actually was the good guy. He had given the 40 acres. And by the end of a season to the people that got it, they took it back. And when he took it back, he would say things like, it's better to have a bank account than land because you will learn thrift and savings. And this is a direct quote, that freedmen should earn land and not receive it as a gift. OK. So the Freedmen Savings Bank was one of the only tangible creations of the Reconstruction Era Freedmen's Bureau. No bank before or ever since was created and established like the Freedmen's Bank. It was created by Congress, signed into law by Lincoln. The Federal Reserve was still decades away. We barely had a national currency. And the bank was immediately successful with the Freedmen and also Irish workers and others who were also discriminated against by the banking sector. So one of the main reasons, though, so that it immediately had $75 million in deposits, which is $1.5 billion today. That's a lot of money at the time because banking wasn't that sophisticated. And one of the things that made this bank so successful is that all the passbooks and the dollars and the notes had the insignia of the federal government at the time. You have to remember that in 1865, we didn't have a national currency. We barely had greenbacks, which were really controversial that Lincoln issued. But a bank's notes would be their money. So if J.P. Morgan gave you $100, you would say, well, it's probably worth $100. But if some Podunk bank in Michigan gave you $100, you would discount it. And there'd be all these flyers that said how much actually it was worth because it was based on the reputation of the bank and your likelihood to collect your money when you presented that note. Now, having the treasury insignia all over these checks seemed to indicate, and the propaganda of the bank also communicated the message that the bank was backed by the full faith and credit of the treasury. It was not. It was completely apart. It was run by, there's a board of directors that were kind of absent. And then there was this manager, Henry Cook, a white manager whose cousin was Jay Cook. And Jay Cook was a famous, infamous railroad speculator. So railroad bonds were the sort of hot sort of subprime bubble of the day. And so he took that $1.5 billion, which, by the way, the bank wasn't authorized to lend. It was just this glorified piggy bank. So that money was just sitting idle. And so he took it and speculated it away. And then it was gone. And it was obviously a huge hit financially, emotionally, morally, psychologically. W.E. Du Bois says of the failure, not even 10 additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedman as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the freedman's bank chartered by the nation for their special aid. This was the relic of the freedman's view. This was the one thing that their union won for them. Their advocates, the sort of good guys, had gotten. And it wasn't their fault. It's just it was a decoy. It wasn't real money. It wasn't land. So the reason I began this project, actually, I didn't mean to write about black banks, but I write about the unbanked and underbanked. And I was looking at this FDIC, unbanked and underbanked data. And there was just drastic racial components to this. So unbanked and underbanked populations in the US are about 10% at max for whites and other races. For blacks, especially in the South, it was up to 60, 65%. And one of the number one or number two reasons that people gave from being unbanked is the lack of trust in banks. And as you dig through some of these oral histories, this was not that long ago. People had grandparents who lost money in the freedman's bank. And those stories were told. I still hear from people when I go out and interview that my grandma put all her money in a shoebox underneath the bed because they don't trust the banks. It wasn't just banks. It was federal government. It was these special programs. So it really shook the trust, as it would, because a lot of people felt as though it was purposeful. It was a swindle, as had been a lot of other things. So by the time the freedman's bank failed, disenfranchisement of the black population was complete. In order to take away your freedom for labor, you have to take away the vote. In order to take away the vote, you have to take away the land. So these things were kind of interrelated. The rights written into the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment were essentially nullified by legislatures, courts, police power, and of course, the paramilitary violence of the Klan. And then in a series of decisions from 1873 to 1898, the Supreme Court weakened even the few rights that black citizens had earned. They blessed Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, outlawed the Civil Rights Act. And the Chief Justice wrote when he did this, 20 years after emancipation. So he said it had been 20 years since slave rape. And it was high time for the slaves to stand on their own two feet and stop being treated as, I quote, the special favorite of the laws, that they didn't need a due process guaranteed by the Supreme Court because they were being protected. I mean, looking back at the South at the time, I mean, it's a really astonishing statement. But I think it puts into context, when you look at history and when people are saying, it was 20 years ago, why can't you forget it? I think you hear that now. It was 100 years ago, why can't you forget it? And I just want to bring up this to update it because it doesn't end at 1865, obviously. OK, so in fact, for the next century, the 14th Amendment came up more to defend corporations against state overreach than it did to protect black men and women against the hostile arm of the state. So after the Freedmen's Bank, I'm going to do something just a little bit positive. After the Freedmen's Bank, in the sort of hostile environment of the South, you have black communities forming and creating self-help organizations. You don't go to a white bank. You don't go to a white insurance company. You don't go to a white social club. You do all this stuff yourself. And the churches, they were all linked together and usually around some church or fraternal society or secret societies that they had at the time. And one of the most successful was Maggie Walker's Bank and Secret Society. She was the first woman of any race to own a bank. She was an incredibly successful black banker. And she just did everything. She ran her churches, St. Luke's Saving Society. She ran the bank, ran college education fund, did tons of mortgages. Her bank is the only one that survives the Great Depression. It actually survives up until the financial crisis of 2008. Obviously, she doesn't. But the bank itself was wiped out during this last crisis. So and then you have the Great Migration, 1910 to about 1940. The majority of the black population moves north and west. And there's a push and pull going on. They're being pushed out of the South because of hostility, because of all weevil, because of the economy. It's just declining. There's recessions. And they're being pulled up north because of the jobs and industrial progress and all this stuff. So as they go up, they're met, of course, with segregation, which leads to these concentrated black populations. And of course, the segregation is enforced by violence at first, until it gets very sophisticated. And I'll talk about that in a second. But it's also the heyday of black banks, especially in places like Chicago, in Baltimore, not in New York. And that's an interesting story that I tell in the book. But I won't go into here. But if there's a time where a segregated economy is going to work, it's going to be at this time. And what I try to demonstrate in the book is that you actually can't have a segregated economy, even if you have wage makers, even if you have a healthy economy, which it wasn't. There wasn't a healthy economy in these black segregated spaces because they didn't own property. But one of the things that the way that banks work is they have deposits. And if you have a lot of small deposits that are volatile because people work, you have to spend more money to service those deposits. So their operating costs were higher. And then their assets were on properties. And what was happening with properties is as these cities are enforcing segregation and there's this push and pull between how big the black neighborhood is getting, I think the whites would prefer that they stayed small, and then it would expand. And so the first few families into the white, they call it block busting. The first few black families on a block would pay a premium for a house. And then, of course, there'd be like mobs outside to enforce. And why were the mobs there? They were protecting their property values. Because what happened once the neighborhood tipped into a black neighborhood is all of those property values declined. So they would try to dissuade. But then as soon as you had like 5% to 10% black families moving in, the neighborhood would tip. The property values would plummet. And the banks would be held with those assets. The other problem with banking, by the way, this is still happening. Equity in black homes does not hold. It's not as dramatic, but it still is the case that where you have a tipping point, where certain percentage of black families or brown families that are poor move into a neighborhood, it quickly shifts in property values. I mean, look at the way people talk about good schools or good neighborhoods or dangers. I mean, we code it differently now, but it's still the same economic market thing going on. So what also happened in these banks is they couldn't keep the money inside the community. Because you can take deposits from the community. You can lend them to the community. But its assets are all owned by whites, starting to be owned by, had started to be owned by whites and weren't owned by blacks. As soon as you purchase, the money leaks out. So these banks were just bleeding money. And so you also have banks like in Manhattan. I wasn't going to talk about it, but it's such a good story. Chase prohibited any charters from being formed in Harlem because they controlled Harlem. And what Chase would do is they would take deposits in Harlem and they would lend downtown. And I found a Chase Teller's dissertation where he said, what was their business model? And he was kind of bragging about this business model. He's like, well, it just turns out that people in Harlem aren't good at business. And so we take their money and then we take it downtown. So it's obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you're not lending people because they're not good at business, they're never going to be able to start a business with the lack of loans. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on. OK, then you have the New Deal, Roosevelt, restructures, US banking and credit markets. Last night we were at an event about a bunch of progressives and a New Deal. And we keep talking about we need a New Deal and a new progressive area. And we certainly do. But the New Deal, it wasn't that it was amazing and it reconstructed everything, but it wasn't that the racial exclusion was like this bug in this otherwise great thing. It was part and parcel of the New Deal. You don't get the New Deal passed. You don't get the progressive reforms passed without this racial inclusion. Why? Because it's the Southern Democrats that push all this stuff with Roosevelt and others. That doesn't change until way later where the politics shifts. So what the New Deal does is it provides sort of an underpinning for mortgages. You didn't get a home mortgage before 1933. And if you did need one, you would put down 50% and then you would get a three to five year mortgage that the bank could recall at any time. So very few people got mortgages. This essentially says the government is going to sponsor mortgages and the GI Bill, student loans. And what happens is that the FHA comes in and says, we're going to guarantee all the mortgages. We're going to give you the loan to value ratio. We're going to give you the interest rate. So we're going to just support you. So if any default happens, we will take care of it. So they just took the risk out of mortgages. So what happens is you've got blue collar workers in Manhattan, I'm using this is where I'm from, are paying $35 or $50 in rent one day. And then they get this brand new house in Levittown that was just created with bowling alleys and movie theaters, or I don't know when movie theaters are embedded, but I think around the 30s. Bowling alleys, movie theaters, and you're paying $35, because you're paying less now. So it's not that mortgages were given to the middle class. It is that the mortgages created the American middle class. And they created it racially. So this is the maps that they used on risk. So they're saying, look, these areas are low risk. And you can lend. This is what banks do. They go and they do risk profiles. So now look at the property. Where is it? What location, blah, blah. And then these are places red was no risk. And so this is an actual HLC. The HLC was the one that did the maps for Atlanta. Anyone here familiar with Atlanta? I use this because that's the Morehouse Spelman neighborhood in Atlanta. And if you look on there, it says, look, this is the trap. So favorable influences, Negro schools, parks, Atlanta University, community businesses. You're saying this is a place where businessmen, I mean mostly all men, businessmen and homeowners live. There are parks. There are universities. And it says somewhere in the bottom, this is the best black area in the state, which it is. And maybe in the country. But you look at this is the top line here. Inhabitants, men, clerical workers, foreign-born families, 0% predominate Negro, yes, 100% infiltration of, and then relief families. So on the top of this form is what is the percentage of blacks and what is the percentage of foreign-born that live in this area? And that was the indicator. So the higher the percentage, the higher the risk. And so this neighborhood that is homeowners, parks, Negroes, best schools is a red zone. So a red zone means no mortgages. So you cannot buy in this neighborhood with an FHA mortgage, which essentially means you can't buy in this neighborhood, which essentially means your property values, even if they were going up before, are no longer going up. Because the market is now gone. It's going somewhere else. Something else that happens, so of course, this is mixed with a lot of other programs as well. One of the other programs, and this gets less talked about. I was just talking about how Richard Rothstein, when he wrote his book, we wrote it at the same time. So I have one chapter on the New Deal. He has a whole book. And I wouldn't have had to do so much research if I could have read his book first. But you have to do the independent research yourself. And now it's more familiar. But at the time, it's like you're digging in through these maps. And since both of us have published our books, you can actually go on a website called Mapping Inequality and look at any area you want. By the University of Richmond, I think, put it together, any area you want in the country and look at the actual maps and the actual forms in that area, which I would recommend that you do. But one of the things that happens also, there's FHA mortgages that we both talk about. And then I talk about also is the FHA consumer loans that ran atop these mortgages. And this is, I think, equally important. Because what's happening in the white wealth owning, mortgage having, GI bill having, suburbs, is you're creating wealth. You also get this FHA program for revolving credit. It's a consumer lending program. So post-war, people are coming back. And now we have refrigerators and washing machines and televisions and all of the stuff that you can buy. And people are buying it with credit. And what's happening in the suburbs is you can get a credit card from Montgomery Ward or wherever and go use that credit card at other places and get your goods. And the interest rates are somewhere around like 6% to 10%. Why? Because what the issuers of the debt can do is sell it up to the secondary markets. Secondary markets got a really bad rap during the financial crisis because of the mortgage back securities. But the great thing about secondary markets is that they lower risk. Because you're pooling everyone's risk together. And so the default risk is less personal. So if you're a lender and if you can sell up your loan, you're less worried about it than if you have to take it on yourself. That's what's happening in the black red-lined spaces is there is no revolving credit. There's installment credit. And what is installment credit is like night and day from revolving credit. Installment credit is that the store that's selling you the couch and the TV is also giving it to you with an installment loan. And they're also bundling this stuff together. So you're getting your TV and your couch and your whatever from the same store. And if you miss one payment, all of it goes away. And how does it go away? Not cleanly and smoothly. You've got repo men and cops and people coming to collect. And they're ashamed. They're actually using as a purposeful sort of way of getting people to pay back. So it's really onerous. But one of the things that happens in response to this dual credit market is that the early buds of a protest movement and an intellectual framing of civil rights is centered around this to fight. So in Harlem and in Chicago, you don't hear about a lot of this in the civil rights movement. We kind of want to start with Martin Luther King. But Martin Luther King was actually inspired by what was going on here in the North. What was happening is that these communities are doing collective boycotts of these lenders. And they're saying, first of all, you're not hiring black workers. You're operating completely in segregated spaces. And you're not hiring. And so we're going to boycott you for that. And also, you're charging more. They're paying, there's studies that say they're paying something like 10 times more for the goods. And the goods are crappier. It's like secondhand stuff that you're paying 10 times more for. So the boycotts are, a store in Harlem goes to the court and says, these boycotts are against the law. And the court is like, no, they're not. It's perfectly fine. You can boycott. And so this court ruling then inspires Martin Luther King to say, oh, we're going to boycott the buses in Montgomery. There were already a movement going on. But in 1950, Martin Luther King sort of takes his case out to Ebony and says, are six plans for the movement? And number one was, I have it right here on a misquote, to establish a bank in Montgomery because they wanted to control that finance. Two was to organize a credit union because we are anxious to demonstrate that cooperation rather than competition is a way to meet problems. So they were going to enforce that. And then they were going to do boycotts of these lending institutions. And number six was voting. So really, the impetus of this is on this. Also, Malcolm X is having a movement also in the north. And the idea there is a little bit different but similar. So why should the white people be running? What he likened the ghetto to is a colony. And it was linked with the colonies across the world. And they're saying, if we're a colony, just we're going to fight for sovereignty. And we're going to fight for land. And you can't come in here and take our money and not we need to have our own institutions. So there's just two parallel and sometimes together, but mostly parallel things going on with different views of what was the solution. But King also, this is too much to read. But if you look at his, I have a dream speech from a banking lens, which I would suggest that you do. He was a director of a bank. And his wife worked as a teller at a black bank in Atlanta. But he says, we've come to cash a check. We're signing a promissory note. This note was a promise guaranteed on alienable rights. America has defaulted on this promissory note. We've given a bad check, a check which would mark insufficient funds. We refuse to believe the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity. And we've come to cash this check, a check that we'll give upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. So he's asking for a reckoning of this economic injustice, not just the one phrase that we all or not we all. But some people like to say of that speech, which is to be treated by content of our character, not the color of our skin. This was not a appeal to color blindness. This was specifically an appeal to redress. He says, after this speech, he moves his family to Chicago to fight segregation. He moves into the slums of Chicago, and he immediately gets depressed. And his kids are angry, and they're fighting, and there's rats. And lest you think that the rat infestation at Harlem, when you look at this historical stuff, rats were the number one issue in places like Harlem and Chicago, because the city was doing nothing about it. And Harlem and Chicago were infested with rats. And there would be like rat protests. You see those inflatable rats now for the unions and stuff, but it really started because you had this community saying, you've got to take care of the rats, and there was no response. So he starts the poor people's movement, and then he says of segregation. He says, the underlying purpose of segregation was to oppress and exploit the segregated, not to keep them apart. The basic purpose of segregation is to perpetuate injustice and inequality. So he's like, it's created. It's not an accident. OK. Everything changes. I just want to go back to this moment, because I think we need to go back to this moment. Everything changes between 1865 and 1868. And I want to take us through this moment really quick, and I know I'm going to run out of time here. But the civil rights law, the voting rights law, Brown v. Board of Ed, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Selma march, all of that happens before 1965. And most of the consensus is, if not halfway done, it's failed a bit. Because what we got, what the movement got in the civil rights law and the voting rights law in Brown v. Board of Ed, is rights that they were guaranteed already in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, that the war had been fought for, and that had been denuded over time. And so they weren't really new rights. They were just, like, we're serious this time. But you know, Roger Wilkins, then there's a backlash, right? Roger Wilkins of the NAACP says, it would have been hard to pass the Emancipation Proclamation in the atmosphere prevailing in 1966. By 1969, Malcolm X is killed, Dr. King is killed, John F. Kennedy is killed, Robert Kennedy is killed, Johnson is out of office. And then you still have this intractable poverty. The Federal Reserve does a study that says the blacks have one-fifth the wealth of white families. Half of black children grew up in deep poverty, compared to 9% of white children. And then there's this really scary thing for white America that happens, which is that these protests turn into violence. So there's riots that erupt in Watts, in Newark, in Chicago, everywhere. And then you have these commissions and these people studying the riots. And one of the commissions is the Kerner Commission. And the first Kerner Commission comes out, and it's like the scathing report. The report is called the Harvest of American Racism. And Johnson scraps it, fires everyone, puts another committee to just tone it down. The second commission comes back, and it's just a scathing. And it says, one of the things it says is what white America has never fully understood, but what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it. White institutions maintain it. And white society condones it. The banking committee studies these riots. And they bring in the FTC and academics, and the Senate itself studies it. And they find three things about riots. One is that the rioters are targeting specific institutions. They're targeting the lenders. And they're saying things like burn the books. It's not just random just anger. It is specifically an extension of this earlier protest against the lenders. Two, that they're leaving alone black lenders. And black businesses. And three, and this is the one that's supported by all the studies that nobody pays attention to, is that these lenders are not making profits. This is confusing. They're not bloodsucking vampires just trying to suck all the wealth. It's a different market. Like I said before, they have no secondary market. They have to take on all the risk of default. We have concentrated all the risk of poverty into one space. And these lenders are the ones. Purchasers are the ones that have to pay for it. So 94% of the cost of loans is actually just overhead and default, and the fact that they can't upsell. They don't have the FHA. So one of the solutions to this ends up becoming to put more black lenders in and black businesses in. And this is where it gets interesting, I think, because then it gets confusing. Everyone ignores the finding. Then you have the election of 1968, which is a really, sorry, you know who wins the election of 1968. But I didn't want to spoil our alert. It was Nixon. OK. It could have been, I mean, it's one of these moments where I would like to go back and see what would have happened. But Robert Kennedy is the front runner. He's killed. Heber Humphrey doesn't have a chance. But on the Republican side, too, there's George Romney. And there's Nelson Rockefeller, both of whom are actually committed to this race issue. George Romney, his mid-father, says he calls the white suburb a noose around the Black ghetto. He says the government created it. We need to fix it. This is George Romney. He's out of the game. And then it's Nixon, who is brilliant. And what Nixon does is there's two options on the table. One group is pushing for integration. You've got the MLK coalition. You've got the George Romneys out there who are trying to push these integration plans. And the other is the Black Power movement pushing for more of an anti-colonial philosophy. He takes on that language of Black power and he twists it into Black capitalism. So he says, yes, we want Black power. And what he means by that is you're going to get Black businesses and Black banks, and you're going to stay in those segregated spaces. Because he's funneling. And one of his aides, L. Rickman, says everything that Nixon said during the election had this subliminal anti-Black message. I don't think it was that subliminal. But it was a pretty good dog whistling. On this, I mean, I think we talk about the law and order language of the Southern strategy. This is the other part. This is how he undercuts the economic demands for justice is he uses capitalism. So this is his, I usually play this, but I don't have time. He says, what we need is Black capitalism. What's interesting here is he says it's time to move past the old civil rights. In his papers, in the first several drafts, it said, forget civil rights. And then someone crossed it out and put, like, move beyond. And someone else put, it's time to move past the old. In his papers, but he says, to his aides, he's like, we got to, I want to quote it right. He says, I want to lay off the Negro crap, OK? So that's essentially the calculus he makes. And he's right, because that's been the strategy. But you can't just say, like Andrew Johnson did, that this is a white man's government. You have to do it differently. And so what does he do is he says Black capitalism. What does that mean? He creates an office of minority business enterprise. And we're going to put some treasury deposits into Black banks. Those deposits don't help, right? For many reasons that I'll explain in a second. Then he, affirmative action is Nixon, right? He says, OK, we're going to convince people to hire more Black employees, set aside, contract, set aside. By the way, all of this stuff within 10 years is, like, decried as reverse racism. But this was it. I mean, in response to the biggest racial uprising, ever, and in response to legitimate demands for either reparations or innovation, he does this. And this gets torn apart. Andrew Brimmer is, this is what I was going to say about the DePlace, Andrew Brimmer is the first Black Federal Reserve chairman. And he's the only one who just senses this hustle. He says, this is not, right? Black capitalism doesn't work, it's nothing. There's no capital in it, right? And there isn't, it's sort of a scam. It's important and the reason I am bringing it up is because it was so skillful that it was adopted by nearly every president since. OK, so Reagan, we start, you know, we start talking about the free economy. His civil rights plank is tax cuts. His civil rights plank is tax cuts, right? So he says, a free economy helps defeat discrimination. Carter, sorry, Ford, which is before Reagan, I skipped him, but he says things like, this minority business thing, it's not a civil rights program or a jobs program, it's a business program, right? He's not saying it as a, he's showing off, right? He's saying, we're done with civil rights, what we're doing is business. Clinton really doubles down on this. And now we're not talking at Black capitalism and we're not calling it the ghetto, we're calling it enterprise zones and we're calling it community empowerment, right? We're saying we can't have a dependent or helpless population. He cuts welfare and he talks about the culture of dependency, right? He's using the similar language, but what he's saying is we're gonna empower these zones. This is a CDFI fund he uses on, related to Shore Bank. This is where it gets a little bit confusing because I think there's a lot of great progressives who use this stuff, but this is, it's Nixonian. What you're saying is we're not gonna fix segregation and we're not gonna give capital, but you're gonna use businesses. And now Clinton and his Larry Summers calls Black banks niche capitalists. We're gonna go in and find profits where nobody has before, right? You have people calling it, I won't quote present people, it will be fair. Clinton, Obama, to his credit, didn't really get into this. He didn't do much. Trump just, right. He, his thing is tax incentives. Trump just came out with opportunity zones, which could not be more Nixonian if you tried. I mean, we're really, we've just shifted the language so much on this that it's hard to even track back. So, now it's not the OMB, it's the Minority Business Development Association. We've got the CDFIs. It's still no capital. There's still no, since George Romney, I forgot to mention the George Romney, but George Romney is Nixon's HUD secretary. He keeps trying integration plans and Nixon keeps shutting it down and he sends him to Mexico finally. And then since then, the FHA has only been used for discrimination. There's been no effort to integrate. And then, of course, the promise of entrepreneurs coming and finding profits eventually did happen in 2008. We had the subprime crisis and the entrepreneurs found profits and the black community lost 53% of their wealth with the 2008 crash, which hasn't recovered, even as we talk about economic recovery. So, in sum, we have to shed these destructive myths that capitalism will fix what public policy created. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto these communities, especially onto black banks and black businesses, because that's not how banks and businesses work. You can't take inequality, throw a bank into it and have it fix it, right? That's not how it works. So, to end, I said, W.E. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the great problem of American democracy was that it had not yet been tried. So, perhaps it's time to try. Thank you. I'm not gonna end with Trump, I'm just kidding. Thank you. I know where to put it, but. Okay, so we're gonna take a few moments now. Marissa and I will have a little bit of an exchange on her work, then I will open it up for the audience to introduce your questions as well. I'm sure there are several things that have come up over the course of this presentation. But where I want to start is sort of back up a little bit. And you said at the beginning that you were not planning to write a book on black banks, right? And what I found is that our professional lives in a lot of ways are an expression of our personal experiences and different things that sort of lead us in one direction or another. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to write this book about black banks and the racial wealth gap. Yeah, so I'll start with, I was radicalized on Wall Street. I was on Wall Street at a big law firm after law school and started in 2005 in the banking group thinking like this was like an academic, sleepy group or you could be home by 8.30, which was great at the time. And then the financial crisis happened and we were the one banking group in Wall Street that had experience doing this stuff. And so we were in the middle of all of the bailout that happened and every myth that I had been taught that banks are public, banks are private, that markets discipline themselves, that the government isn't involved in all this stuff. All of the sort of the neoliberal myths just came crashing down for anyone who was involved. The Fed comes in, rescues everybody, trillions of dollars created and it wasn't as though this was a scam. This was just what had to be done. Nobody at the table was saying we shouldn't do this because we were on this precipice. So after that, so I spent some time at the firm doing that and then I went into the academy after taking time off, careers, nobody plans anything. But then I started writing about banking when I became a professor and I started kind of writing about banking technically and risk and then it just kind of occurred to me one day like if we have this public banking system that is supported by essentially tax dollars in the Federal Reserve, why is it not serving everybody? Why are a bunch of people unbanked? Why are some people getting screwed by the banks? And why don't we do anything about it? So I started writing articles in that, my first article, one of my first articles is that postal banking, we should do this again. So I started digging around in this history and we had this postal bank, which was a public bank. So I proposed that idea and that kind of took off and I wrote this book. And then as I'm digging through this history, I'm looking at, I'm like, there's these black banks. Why do we, why don't, why does anyone talk about this? So I started doing this research like 10 years ago on the black banks and I kept asking my library, my variant, can you please just give me all the books on black banks? I really want to know more about this. And they just kept saying like, there are no books on black banks. So I go and find the articles, like the treatises there must be some books on this. And I think what had happened is that there were books earlier on, but the industry had so been subsumed in the other sort of stuff in the neoliberal era that no one was actually like breaking it down. And so I kind of decided to write about black banks and then I was just gonna write about black banks. And then when you dig into this history and it wasn't just about black banks, it ends up becoming about all of the ways of the politics. And when I went to the Nixon archives, I expected that to be like one or two pages. And as I was in there, I was like, this is the whole thing. I mean, I had no idea. I mean, I was looking at boxes of Nixon memos to his aides that people overlook because I think everyone's interested in Watergate and not the campaign. And when you look at the campaign, you see people like Alan Greenspan writing memos to Nixon saying, hey, the answer to reparations is capitalism. So actually devising this whole agenda against the civil rights movement. So you see, and so I just study, and I probably read 300 books to write this one because I wanted to make sure I was getting it right because it was so surprising to me and it was so depressing to me. And I'm not like naive or stupid, but I was like, it can't have been that bad. And I think every source was like, no, it actually was. And now that I've written it and have had talks to people and they were like, why was there? And actually that was it. And I think it's hard to lay it out, but personal experience to why do I care about inequality? I was an immigrant, I came when I was nine, grew up in the quote unquote bad neighborhoods always. And then until later in high school, my parents worked and then finally kind of got good jobs when I was later in high school. And so I saw what that does. And I think we sort of pathologize poverty, we blame people, we don't understand what it is like. It's not poverty is not like you with less money. It's a whole ecosystem of decisions that you can't make of constraints, of scarcities, of fears, of violence. And I was lucky that I didn't have what a lot of people experience in poverty because my family was good to me. I was taken care of, right? But I think I just didn't like the way that academics and others pathologize the poor. And so most of my work tries to sort of explain, tries to explain why things are the way they are and not what you think they are. I think you do a really good job of that in the book. I mentioned in the introduction the various accolades that you've received for this work. And I'm sure anytime that you do something that receives a claim, you can also expect to receive criticism for it. What are some of the most common criticisms of your thesis that you've received and where or whom do they typically come from? So I was really nervous to do this book. I'll say one thing. One place I thought I would get criticism that I didn't and I'm really happy about is the Black Bankers Association because I'm not against black banks, but it's not like, for me, that's not the solution, right? And for various reasons. But I was invited to their convention and I have a standing invite to their conventions, but they loved it because what they were saying is like, this is our problem. And thank you for outlining it. So I was super nervous that they were gonna be not see what I was trying to do, but I was grateful for that. I do get a lot of responses. I don't think they're good faith, but this whole like, well, what about Asian immigrants? What about these other immigrant groups? And it's a silly misunderstanding of how immigration versus embedded racial capitals work. I think I get, you know, I get pushed back on from some left people saying, well, why aren't you, why isn't this just capitalism? And why aren't you just like, why are you talking about capitalism as though it could be good? And my response to that is I don't, like I said in the beginning, I don't actually think we have had capitalism. I think that that's not useful when we're talking about the race-based economy. FHA, the New Deal was not capitalism. The Homestead Acts were not capitalism. Neither was Jim Crow capitalism. Jim Crow was heavy state policing of a certain race. And so to say capitalism's a problem, maybe, but that would be a hypothetical question that we have not lived in this country. So I wanna get into sort of the crux of what you were talking about earlier and these principles of self-sufficiency, blind black, making black, as you know, they're very strongly held beliefs and aspirations even in the black community as it relates to economic empowerment in particular. And in your book, you make a very strong case for why these principles and this idea of black capitalism really is not the solution to the racial wealth gap. So my question is if that's not the solution, what is? And is there a role or a place that the sort of economic self-sufficiency, economic empowerment principles play in those solutions? Absolutely, and I didn't get into it here because I didn't think this group wanted to hear about, I had to make a decision on what to focus on, but usually when I talk about black banks, I talk about who created black banks. And usually what it is is you've got a preacher, you've got an activist, and it's rooted in boycott. And they will say things like, we are a mixed institution, we're not just trying to go for the bottom line, we're actually, this is community activism. And one thing that black banks have never done, black banks did not do subprime. Black banks always protect the institutions, black banks are doing the best that can be done in finance in those communities. Black banks were the centers of the movement, right? It was the preachers and the banks together, it was the insurers and the bankers that funded the preachers. It was the bankers that were involved in some of that organization. Now sometimes there has been tensions where a bank will have to collect on, foreclose on a church that happened in Boston. That was a huge sort of black church, black owned bank, black owned bank has to foreclose on the church. And of course, everyone's on the church's side, but I feel for the bankers because you've got to survive too, and you need your loan. And anyway, that was a whole fiasco. So you see that across time. So absolutely, and this is a way of really putting your money where your mouth is. Killer Mike just did a bank black project again and the idea there, and he says, he's like, take your money out of the dog's mouth. They're not representing you, that's a direct quote, right? He says, and I get it, right? I bank at a black bank because the idea is to just take your money out and use it for a force of good. But if you talk to black bankers and you say like, are you creating, well, there's 20 black banks in this country, right? That is not, you cannot put the onus on them. It's not their problem. They didn't create this problem. So what is the solution? I think you're talking, you have to be talking reparations. You have to be talking some sort of land, property, capital looking at what was done and what was taken and what was not given. And I don't want to talk about, everyone wants to go to the reparations discussion to like step five, which is how exactly does this work? And I don't want to go there, right? We need to start with step one is like, we need to like do truth and reconciliation and all the stuff that happened after all the bad things other countries did. And I think what the US did is that we have this institution of slavery and then Jim Crow and then segregation and we use all of these myths to justify it. So first we're saying, well, God ordained the white man master and the black man slave. And then we're saying, well, science and look at these skull measurements and the pseudo science social Darwinism crap and we've got these racial orders and it's evolution. And now I think we use this law of the market or whatever as sort of dogma. But what happens after slavery is we have these dogmas of white supremacy to justify slavery. We end slavery and we don't look at those dogmas and say, hey, we needed those myths to justify this institution that was actually an economic institution. We wanted cheap labor and we had guns and we took cheap labor and then we had to create this myth. So we're not the evil ones, right? So now we don't need that myth. Let's get rid of it. So what's happened is when we get rid of those institutions those myths linger. And I think what reparations and truth and reconciliation does is have us confront those myths of racial superiority and inferiority. We created, we as a nation created whiteness, right? We created race to justify all of these things. And I think I see reparations and maybe again call me like super hopefully naive but I see it as healing for everybody. I don't, I think it could be a real sort of just, I mean, as an example when the Kurner Commission came out Marlon Brando read the whole thing on TV. I mean the Kurner Commission is as close that we came to truth and reconciliation because that report is really stark. It was really clear. And so I think we need something like that. I think there are other solutions to closing the racial wealth gap. I think reparations is over here as a thing that has to happen to get over all that stuff. But I think there's racial wealth gap solutions that could be done immediately. Housing, right? Capital, so instead of opportunity zones actually hand over properties in these areas with financing like we did with FHA. So you're paying just as much as you didn't rent you get the down payment. And these things are actually being operationalized by some of the candidates that I'm proud to have worked with and put together some plans. So housing, you can't talk about racial wealth gap and all the stuff without talking about schools. We have a segregated school system. We have property taxes. I mean taxing was a race-based thing, right? You can't, your property taxes fund your schools. You've got different schools, different funding. You can't talk about social capital. You've got to talk about criminal justice. You've got to talk about policing. I mean all of this stuff ends up being together. But I think stems from segregation and the wealth gap, right? So you've really answered my next question which was about reparations. So if this time, if there are folks from the audience I want to give everyone a chance to get in on this. We have, Carl, you want to grab this for someone? Want to, can I get someone else to grab this mic to help? Yeah. That's the one that you had. We'll go with the young lady here in the front. I think her hand will go up. Right here, you. Yeah. Hi, thank you. Excellent presentation. We're Facebook friends. So I've been following you for a minute. I definitely made sure I was here to see this. But you talked about property values. This has been something that I've been puzzled about than the tipping point. Isn't that a public policy or sort of like I'm from Ohio but I live in Maryland now, live in the DC area, Montgomery County, Maryland. But in Ohio, there was this office called the County Recorder. And they determine property values. Isn't it like that everywhere that the county or some government entity determines property values? Because otherwise, who is the decision maker on what the tipping point is? It's the market. So it's what people want to pay and what neighborhood you want to go to live in. So I'm right now in the middle of trying to get a mortgage and buy a house. I just moved to California, right? And it's hard. But you go and you look at the realtors and they'll tell you, here's a neighborhood with good schools and the property values are this much, right? And what does that mean? It's 100% white, right? And the schools are good schools because they're 100% white. There's that direct correlation. Then you go and in California, where I'm living in California, it's not a black, white thing. There's Latinos, right? So poor Latinos. As soon as a neighborhood has like, if a school has 40% Latinos, it's automatically a bad school and a bad neighborhood and those houses are cheaper. Because the market, the buyers, it's people like me who are out there buying a house. I mean, I am purposefully, I know this stuff. So I'm trying, I think my kids are gonna be fine no matter what. So I'm happy to send them to a quote unquote bad school which I don't believe exists. But most people don't. So I think most people still value living in an all white neighborhood and most people will not live in an all black or Latino neighborhood and that's how the market is decided. I mean, yesterday I was talking to the DOJ and one of the lending operators, he's an FHA, African-American guy. He's been living in, you know, he says it's a black community and he knew when he bought his house like 30 years ago that he was sacrificing all of the equity. He has the nicest house in a black neighborhood and he's like, if I had bought like one town over, I would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars and he says my house has depreciated in value over 30 years because it's a black neighborhood. But he knew that going in but he wanted to live in a black neighborhood. You have black financial analysts telling black, wealthy people to not buy, to rent and to put your money in the stock market because that's the only way you're gonna get appreciation. That is not, no one's determining that. This is not policy, I wanna be clear. We all make this happen. We all decide to put our kids into white schools. We all protest when affordable housing comes into our neighborhood. Look what's happening in this community out here where they're trying to do that adjacent, what do you call it, like a extra house? Yeah, what's it called? Accessory dwelling units. And they're trying to do accessory dwelling units which would be mixed income properties. So lower income people can move into the neighborhood. And I've heard some of the things I've been following a little bit. People are like, oh, we're gonna become just like Prince George County. And that's, we're saying that's bad. And these are not bad people. I'm sure they voted for Obama twice, right? They are, what they're saying is I don't want my property values to go down. But what they're actually saying is I don't want this to become a black neighborhood or a brown neighborhood. I mean, I'm not, like, I don't think they're actually saying that. But I think that's what they're thinking or somewhere subconsciously. So, yeah, that's depressing, I'm sorry. Let's get someone on this side. So I looked at your statistics. I'm curious, when I look at your statistics, why aren't you also comparing blacks with maybe Asians or blacks where Spanish? Because if you look at Asian American history, and I'm sorry, once you said about Asian Americans, I kind of fell upset about it. But they came in 1898, and they came from colonized rule. They did not come on their free will. So if you look at Asian countries, they've been colonized since 1940s. I'm from India, and we were under white rule until 1947, and even after that, we suffered a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. So when I look at since 1898 and compare black history, we overtook white families very easily and are doing so much well. So why don't you want to compare something that's like more minority to minority? Because if you look at for every one Asian American, there are like 2.5 blacks. But for one black, there are five whites or four whites. So proportionate disparity is pretty high. Or even if you look at like for one black, there's 1.3 Hispanics. It makes more sense for that comparison also. Why don't you want to compare those stats also? Okay, I do. I'll answer in a couple of things. I'm from Iran. So if you want to talk about colonization, I mean, we've tried to get independence. The British came in, the Russians came in, the Americans came in, we had an election where we elected a leader and a CIA over through him. And we have also suffered. We have been like in famine and political turmoil. I mean, everything bad that's happened in Iran is because the empire wanted our oil and they ran tracks through our country. I get it, right? And I fully support the British empire paying India reparations for the wealth that was stolen, for the famines that they created, for all of the economic devastation that they created. Let me finish. As far as the comparison to America, first of all, I think the reparations conversation in America needs to be between Americans and black Americans, black descendants of slaves. There is other conversations that happened. But the other, why the wealth, right? There's a couple of things. One is when you look at the segregation indexes, other groups were segregated, but not like blacks, okay? The segregation indexes. But I'm not talking about colonization. I'm talking about segregation and home values. That's not something we're going to colonization. But you're changing the conversation. But you just said colonization happened. I am saying colonization happened and I recognize that. I am saying that it's not the same factors that I am focusing on, which is housing segregation and equity in property. They had internment and they got reparations. And they got reparations. You did not because it wasn't America that colonized you. We can pick this up at another time. But for now, I want to get as many questions as possible. Hi, I just, first of all, I'd like to thank you for giving this talk because it's been very interesting. Can I just say one thing? To say that one group has had it bad does not mean other groups. I mean, I also didn't write about Native Americans. Like, Native Americans were screwed. Like, I mean, they were murdered. They were killed by the diseases. And so to say that I didn't write a book about Native Americans, not because they didn't suffer, but because I think this topic is interesting. It's the definition of anti-fighting. I'm an organizer. I wish, instead of punching down, that we would punch up. Because I think if you look at colonization, we don't have to be fighting other immigrants or other groups that demand. We can just fight the colonizers. Or at this point, it could be the, like, we could fight over one plot of land. Or we could look at J.P. Morgan's profits for one year and say, like, we could break them up and everyone can get jobs, right? It's not about, like, the Mexicans are not coming to take your jobs. And if we do reparations, that's not going to hurt you. What we could do is sort of look at corporate power and look at colonization in any way. Next question. I didn't mean to make anyone angry. This is kind of a broad question. So I'll just give that disclaimer. And it's also a very long term, but I was wondering, do you think that we can get to an economy that empowers black people and black communities, but is a free market capitalist economy? Do you see that as a possibility? And if so, how far away? OK, so free market capitalism. So I do banking, right? And I think this is where I go back to money is a creation of the state. And we haven't done it any other way, OK? So to say free market capitalism, I mean, you have these sort of Bitcoin enthusiasts who talk about money as a non-state thing. Those are the only people who actually have this sort of vision. Everyone else who actually deals with money and banking understands that it's tied into the state. So when you look at free market capitalism theories, you're either talking about Adam Smith or Milton Friedman, Hayek, these were very theoretical, OK? So I guess I want to be clear on what we're talking about and what we're not talking about. If we talk about free market capitalism as in no state intervention, that's just, it's very theoretical and abstract, and we just have never lived it. If we're talking about actually the economy that the US has, which is a mixed government, private, public economy, yes, I don't think we need to destroy that. I think there's a, you know, I'm going to reveal myself. I think there's an age divide on people who are sick of capitalism and they want socialism. I think those are not super useful. I mean, I think they trigger people, you know, like who are stuck in that Cold War era. I think it's fine to say capitalism, but what you mean is sort of like big public projects. You know, you can have a Fed jobs guarantee if you want. You can have whatever your, you know, program is, fits into the US capitalist system that we have. And so yes, I believe in market prices. I believe that the Soviet communist campaign did not work. I believe it relied on a lot of, you know, murder, you know, and suppression of rights. So I like free speech, you know. And I like that the capitalist system that we have, you know, actually undergirds the democracy. What I care more about is to actually ensure that democracy, right? Again, I come from a country that is, doesn't have that democracy, right? And what happens to capitalism in those countries is it gets corrupt really quickly. And I think the US is not near to that level of corruption, but we are, you know, the wealth gap, not just black, white, but 1% everyone else is getting so huge that I think we're threatening just democracy as it is, right? When you have some, a few people with so much political power, I worry a little bit about, you know, our voices being heard. All right, I think we have time for, we'll come back on the side of the room. Thank you so much for extraordinary research and amazing presentation. As you were speaking, I was thinking of the book Collective Courage that sort of, I guess, tries to unearth some of the history of cooperative action among American communities. And so I had a related question, which I guess is not so removed from what was just asked, which is, do you see anything in sort of this tradition of more cooperative action, of credit unions, of kind of capitalism with a sense of social responsibility, or however you want to think about it, whether there's something there that needs to be unearthed that has a part to play, recognizing that thus far our experience has faced huge limitations, partly because of the context you described, but is there a piece there that could be built on? Yes, so my first book actually goes to the history of that. So credit unions, buildings and loans, savings and loans, all of these cooperative banking institutions that were developed in a certain era. It was a different philosophy of finance and banking was communitarian, it was holistic. It was a 19th century solution to a 19th century problem. I think what we have now in banking is national banking. And so what I see now is a cynical use of that. So if we have a banking system that is all connected and national and connected to the Fed and you're telling poor communities to do self-help credit unions, that's the thing that I don't like. So my first book kind of goes at that and that's why I say postal banking, right? Just connect it into the federal government, do it in a different way. That is, but that still recognizes that banking is public. So I'm about a public option in banking. I think the collective sort of progressive theory was the sort of basis of the first progressive movement. And I think when we think about the next progressive movement, we have to sort of reorient ourselves around that because I think we just live in a different world. We're connected, we're federal, and you know, we're like, it wasn't, people didn't want that, right? But after the New Deal, after the Federal Reserve, I don't think you'd go back to like a local credit union working. Last question. I was just wondering, you talked about the different public policies that could be implemented to reduce the racial wealth gap, but I was wondering, do you feel like those actually address that delay that black people already have accumulated over all these years? Because I feel like no matter what, the institutions are still in place and still benefiting the people who are already on top. So how do we make sure that, okay, we're helping black people increase their wealth, but at the same time, they're still below and they'll continue being below? Yeah. No, I think you can disrupt these things quickly. I mean, and I look back to the Homestead Acts and the FHA. So one of the things about whiteness that's interesting is that it's expandable. Because it's not just some medical trait, right? So you look at Italians and Irish and they were segregated and they were seen as lower races and they were put in these communities, but the FHA included them, right? And now there's no Italian white race gap or wealth gap, there's no Irish white race gap. And so with one program, within a span of five to 10 years, you can actually eliminate those disparities. A Homestead Act, right? That eliminated a bunch of disparities. You can do it quickly if you do it right. Now, as far as the top down, I think that's harder, but this is where I talk about wealth as opposed to income. Income takes a long time, but wealth, I mean, wealth tax, right, just inheritance tax, right? You don't get to have empires and a legacy of billions passing down to your children. If you believe in capitalism, you put it back in the pot and let entrepreneurs create new things with new money. And so I don't, there was a stat that someone came out, like it's gonna take 228 years to close a racial wealth gap. And I disagree with that on both counts because if we don't do anything, it will never close on its own because of the ways that these cycles perpetuate, but you can close it quickly if you focus on the right things. And do we have the political appetite to do it? I hope so. But I think you do have to convince people that it's not zero sum and that's hard. You know, I think as was demonstrated, it's really hard, I think, to convince people that this doesn't hurt you. I think making other people better and whole doesn't take away from you. And I don't know how to do that, but if you all do, then let me know. All right, I think that's probably the best place to wrap up this conversation. Please join me in thanking Marisa for having me. And there are books for sale on the table out there. If you haven't gotten one, please pick up a copy of Marisa's book. And I believe she's willing to stick around and sign if you'd like to have your book signed.