Welcome back to Three Things. Today our guest is Mirza Barataran, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and author of How the Other Half Banks, Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy. In her most recent book, The Color of Money, Black Banks, and the Racial Wealth Gap. Growing up in Iran, Mirsa experienced firsthand a deep decline of government, where many people's

rights were stripped away.

When her family immigrated to the U.S., she was just nine years old, but already deeply

passionate about the preservation of institutions and the rule of law.

After graduating law school in the U.S. and working on Wall Street during the economic

collapse and recovery, Mirza became even more focused on flaws in our system and how they could be made better.

Her current work focuses on the racial wealth gap in America and how it can be tied back

directly to historical policies and continued systemic issues.

In this episode, Rick and Mirza talk about the history of the racial wealth gap,

the impacts of it today, and what can be done to move the needle on these issues.

This is three things with Mirza Barataran.

Hello, Professor. It's good to see you again. How are you?

Hi, Rick. Good to see you again, too.

I want to get right into it. Tell us about the myths in society around capitalism in your mind.

Yeah.

So that, that I think is the myth that I go at in the entire book, is this idea that like,

we live in a capitalist society and the alternative is socialism.

But we also don't live in a straight capitalist system. And I think that's especially true when you look at the black community and other communities that have been left out.

So this book actually started as a project of looking at several different sort of excluded communities over the year.

So Italians, you know, Jewish immigrants, Polish immigrants, Germans, Italians, Italians, and Irish, and how they were not considered white.

There was a lot of discrimination. And, you know, none of which was as much as the black, white racial wealth gap.

And so I kind of fixed on that story because I think it tells every other story.

...