In her book
The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran explains how the program was innovated in Richard Nixon’s administration. As he took office in 1968, black Americans reeled from generations of discrimination. Instead of mobilizing the large federal government response needed to quell racial inequality through reparations or targeted anti-poverty programs, the president nimbly “co-opted the black power movement’s rhetoric of economic self-determination to push a segregated black economy, thereby justifying his neglect of other proposals for meaningful reform.”
This program was black capitalism—a series of meager tax breaks and incentives touted as enabling a black entrepreneurship that would supposedly redress generations of racialized American plunder. It was a farce—a decoy made of Styrofoam and plastic. But its minuscule price tag and rhetorical appeal made it a political masterstroke that grew into the go-to policy for American presidents.
“Carter did it, Reagan did it, Clinton did it, Obama did it, [and] Trump is doing it now with Opportunity Zones,” Baradaran told me. “Opportunity Zones is black capitalism. It’s been denuded of the word ‘black,’ but it’s essentially the same idea.”
“We’re pretending like we’re helping distressed communities through capital, but it’s actually not capital for the communities themselves. It is development incentives. It is rich private-equity firms and hedge funds getting tax incentives to do stuff, build stuff, and to create stuff in these distressed communities. They get the upside, and they’re protected from the downside because they are going to get tax credits. That is an extension of Nixon’s brilliant decoy,” she continued.
“It looks like we’re helping, but we’re actually not,” Baradaran said. “All it does is prop up a few black businesses to sort of allow for the segregated market to continue breeding inequality.”
(timestamped)
at the least, heavily influenced
they damn near say that’s better than starting your own shyt.
