Defunding the authorities is just part of the structural reform needed to root out racism in the U.S., states Mehrsa Baradaran, a law teacher at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the economic inequities in between Black and white Americans.
What’s genuinely required is a big-picture rethink of U.S. policy at every level, she informed HuffPost in an interview by phone and in follow-ups over e-mail today.
In her 2017 book “ The Color of Money,” Baradaran lays out how, over centuries, policymakers wrote Black Americans out of the economic system– and how policies blocking Black people from getting home mortgages, land and credit produced an enormous wealth space in between Black and white Americans that persists to this day. In her book, Baradaran says that after slavery was eliminated, Black Americans held just.5%of all the wealth in the U.S. Today, the number is barely greater, at about 1%.
Baradaran’s work resonates now as millions demonstration around the U.S.– speaking out not just against police brutality against Black Americans, however the systemic racism that pervades America’s organizations. The coronavirus pandemic has actually revealed the terrible results of this inequality, as Black Americans disproportionately bear the brunt of fatalities from the infection and its financial fallout.
Baradaran dealt with a couple of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders– Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg– on their policy propositions for attending to the racial wealth space.
HuffPost spoke with Baradaran by phone about how her research study uses to the social discontent grasping the country right now.
This interview has actually been modified and condensed for clearness.
On Twitter, a press reporter from The Washington Post asked what public law would do the most to deal with the anger revealed around the country today. You said: “Reparations.”
The [killing] of George Floyd fired up the demonstrations, but the underlying concerns are longstanding.
I teach agreement law.
After the Civil War, the freedmen were freed, in theory.
Then the New Offer. Another big structural minute. We produce the white residential areas with federally moneyed, subsidized credit. It rewrote our economy from scratch. Blacks were entirely overlooked. [You can read more about racist New Deal policy in “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking 2014 essay in The Atlantic.]
Then, there’s racially explicit agreements that state you can not offer this home to a Black person. These are all ingrained in law.
Then, we say those laws are illegal [with civil rights legislation in the 1960s] however don’t do anything