The racial wealth gap is today one of the most salient features of the American polity. This course places widening racialized inequalities in a broad historical perspective by connecting them to the politics of money and credit. Ever since colonial times, Americans have passionately, even violently, debated the nature of money. We will follow these debates to study how money and credit have been intimately linked to questions of race from Alexander Hamilton to Martin Luther King Jr. We will connect this historical material to political theoretical debates about race, credit, and money today.
