Free Republic

Professor Mehrsa Baradaran has applied pressure to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to openly embrace a reparations plan for black Americans Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California at Irvine's School of Law and prominent advocate of reparations for black Americans, has been tapped to join the Biden-Harris transition team. Baradaran argues that reparations, giving money to black Americans to compensate for slavery, would correct capitalist "white supremacy" in America and close the resulting racial wealth gap. "A reparations program could take many forms from simple cash payments or baby bonds to more complex schemes such as subsidized...

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...