Great reads guide our work and our belief in better ways.
A pillar of our work as a ten year-time limited initiative is constant learning and deep connectivity with the communities we serve, their current economic realities and the historic toll of systemic racist practices in communities across this country. The future we seek to help influence begins partly by understanding the costs that have already been paid and the lessons from the past yet to be fully leveraged. Periodically, we’ll share what’s on our current reading list. If you know of a title that fits our mission, we welcome suggestions.
To the extent that the media and politicians focus on the racial divide, it is through its most urgent and salient features such as police shootings, burning cities, white supremacists, crime and violence. Underneath it all is a deep and growing financial fault line between black and white. Though hard to detect, it is nonetheless the defining feature of America’s racial divide because it is intimately linked to so many other problems. The wealth gap is where the historic injustice breeds present suffering.’’
B etween 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. Through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by Black women, Shennette Garrett-Scott’s Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal offers an unparalleled account of how Black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Garrett-Scott reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society.
“( The New York Times Book Review ) modern classic that coined the term “metaverse” — one of Time ’s 100 best English-language novels. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous. . . you’ll recognize it immediately.’’
This article was originally published on Medium. Read it on Medium →