Check out our collection of impactful speaker videos

Rainbow PUSH Coalition- Emergency Summit for Gaza

Ceasefire, Saving Lives, and Building Peace Panel

The Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations held the twenty-eighth annual Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society.

Mehrsa Baradaran '05, Professor of Law at University of California Irvine School of Law, delivered her lecture titled, “The Spirit of the Law: Race and Legal Hypocrisy”.

Black families suffer the longstanding legacy of racially discriminatory housing policies. One proposal to remedy that legacy is called the “21st Century Homestead Act.” The basic approach is a wholesale transfer of land to residents who meet certain criteria. The author of the plan is Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor of law at the University of California Irvine School of Law. She is the author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”

Karen interviews Mehrsa Baradaran, author of Color of Money for #OneUnitedBank #OneTransaction Conference held #Juneteenth2021 #KarenHunter #MehrsaBaradaran

Mehrsa Baradaran, UC Irvine School of Law; Darrick Hamilton, The New School; and Christina Greer, Fordham University discuss the systemic roots of the racial wealth gap at No City Limits 2021.

Data show that the median white family has 10 times more wealth than the average Black family, a fact grimly familiar to law professor Mehrsa Baradaran. In her award-winning book, “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap,” she examines how Black communities have been systemically shut out of the banking system – a big brick in the wall of structural racism. Michel Martin speaks with Baradaran about these issues even before the current crises sweeping America. This conversation shows just how prescient her warnings are.

The Motion: This House Believes It Is Immoral To Be A Billionaire.

Professor Mehrsa Baradaran closes the case for the Proposition, as the seventh speaker of eight in the debate.

Professor Mehrsa Baradaran is a law professor at the University of Georgia specialising in banking law, she has written two books, How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money.

ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY: The Oxford Union is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. Since 1823, the Union has been promoting debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

Today, 40 million Americans do not have access to basic financial services. In this talk, Mehrsa Baradaran, author of "How the Other Half Banks," envisions a new take on an old banking system and a solution for America's banking deserts.

Mehrsa Baradaran has been is an associate professor at Georgia Law since 2012. Previously, she taught at Brigham Young University, where she was named 1L Professor of the Year by the Student Bar Association. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University, she went on to study law at NYU, where she was an Academic Research Fellow at served as a member of the New York University Law Review. Baradaran’s book How the Other Half Banks received significant media coverage and has been featured in The New York Times among other national and international news outlets.

It’s expensive to be poor, but perhaps the widest discrepancy is in the world of banking. Unable to maintain a minimum balance or provide the necessary ID to open a bank account, many poor people rely on fringe financial services like check cashing stores and payday lenders, which charge interest rates that can reach the triple digits.

It doesn’t have to be that way, says Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia law professor and author of “How the Other Half Banks,” about inequality in the banking system. Baradaran blames deregulation beginning in the 1970s, which lead to the megabanks we know today — banks so big they can no longer be bothered with the smaller transactions of low-income Americans. The solution, Baradaran says, is an old one — postal banking. Mainstream commercial banks have all but abandoned low-income Americans, leaving vast banking deserts in areas of concentrated poverty, she says. But there’s a post office for every zip code in the country. And because the post office isn’t controlled by demanding shareholders, it could offer services at much lower rates than commercial banks.

The United States has two separate banking systems--one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. Deserted by banks and lacking credit, many people are forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services thanks to the effects of deregulation in the 1970s that continue today. In "How the Other Half Banks," legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran proposes a solution: reenlisting the U.S. Post Office in its historic function of providing bank services.