Tag: Black families
Why Stocks, Crypto, and Home Values Are All Plunging at Once
Here’s a bit of esoterica I think about from time to time: Mark Zuckerberg has a mortgage.
Or at least, he had one. A decade ago, the Facebook founder refinanced his loan on a $6 million Palo Alto mansion. He was worth $16 billion at the time, meaning he could have bought that house and a hundred more outright, no mortgage necessary. But First Republic Bank offered him an adjustable-rate loan with an initial interest rate of just 1.05 percent—below
The Legacy of a Forgotten Killing in Mississippi
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It is late evening on Tuesday, May 25, 1971, in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the small Delta town of Drew. A young Black woman stands on Union Street in a yellow dress. She is a teenager, thin, pretty, and dark-skinned, with straight black hair and thick bangs. At
‘Bel-Air’ and the Flawed Logic of ‘Black Excellence’
A pair of massive double doors swing open, and a teenage Will Smith (played by Jabari Banks) walks into his aunt and uncle’s palatial Bel-Air home, where a big-dollar cocktail-party fundraiser is taking place. The soulful hip-hop song “A Lot,” by 21 Savage, soundtracks the scene. “How much money you got? (A lot),” the lyrics recite, seemingly narrating Will’s awe as he clocks the material evidence of the Banks-family fortune. “Yo! I got some rich-ass relatives,” he says. This scene