California State Professor: If You Don't 'Bank Black, You Are Funding White Supremacy'
Dr. Melina Abdullah — a California State University professor who is also a founding member of Black Lives Matter (BLM) — has called on all allies to move their money to black-owned banks.
“Wells Fargo and Citibank…they’re putting the dollars that you give them in the institutions that keep us oppressed,” Abdullah said on Saturday. “If you’re not going to bank black, you are funding white supremacy.”
Her comments came during a Facebook Live panel sponsored by OneUnited Bank — the largest African-American-owned bank in the United States — whose partnership with Black Lives Matter has thrived throughout 2017.
[clip]
“We’re going to put our dollars with OneUnited because we know OneUnited is going to help us develop a reparations fund for our people,” Abdullah cited as an example. “We know OneUnited is going to help fund the movements that are going to help us get free.”
[clip]
The bank became the focus of a House ethics probe after receiving a $12 million bailout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) — which was supposed to help “healthy institutions” recover from the 2008 economic crisis. As the New York Times reported, “the aid surprised some bank analysts because OneUnited was then considered to be in precarious financial shape.” One study published by NBC News concluded that the bank “was the weakest” of the more than 700 financial institutions that received TARP money.
During the investigation, federal banking regulators discovered Rep. Maxine Waters’s husband once sat on the bank’s board of directors, which raised concerns over her family’s financial ties to the institution. The board had approved footing the bill for a lavish lifestyle for Kevin L. Cohee, OneUnited’s CEO, which included financing a Porsche, a Jaguar, a luxury condo in South Florida, and a $26,500 monthly lease for a beach house in Santa Monica, California.
color me shocked the United ONE bank has had financial difficulties