On January 28th, Professor Mehrsa Baradaran gave a very well-received lecture on “The Color of Money: How can journalists improve their coverage of the racial wealth gap?” to an audience that included students on the masters programme in Business and Economic Reporting at NYU.

Professor Baradaran discussed the stubborn persistence of the racial wealth gap in America by focusing on black banks, the generators of wealth in the black community. Her research challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Professor Baradaran outlined some of the ways that the next generation of financial journalists can help tackle this inequity with their writing.

Professor Baradaran is Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law and a celebrated authority on banking law. She has published several books on the banking sector, race and inequality, including The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017) and How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (2015). She has advised American senators and representatives on policy and spoken at national and international forums including the World Bank.

The Marjorie Deane Financial Journalism Foundation financially supports the business and economic reporting (BER) masters programme at NYU in several ways. It helps to fund the Marjorie Deane Professor of Journalism at NYU, a position which is currently held by Stephen D. Solomon, scholarships for the BER masters programme and the Marjorie Deane Summer School.