Professor Mehrsa Baradaran is the author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, a history of black-owned and black-oriented banks in the United States. It’s not a happy story. Baradaran’s narrative spans the post-Civil War Reconstruction years to the present day and in it she tracks the government’s basic failure to equip former slaves with trustworthy wealth-building institutions in the 1800s, the disastrous effect poverty and racist economic segregation had on black banks’ ability to serve their community, the cynical use of “black capitalism” rhetoric by mainstream politicians (particularly Richard Nixon) to diffuse demands for...