Mama Younger: Son, how come you talk so much ’bout money?
Walter Lee Younger: Because it is life, Mama!
Mama Younger: Oh. So now it's life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life – now It's money. I guess the world really do change.
Walter Lee Younger: No – it was always money, Mama. We just didn't know about it.
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1958), 74
The disproportionate impact of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent economic recession on black families in the United States has helped to revive a long-standing debate about the relationship between race, inequality and the political and economic structures of American capitalist society. The seemingly unmistakable, and increasing, correlation between race and poverty in America has led many to challenge the powerful and pervasive idea – central to the colour-blind conservatism espoused by many on the American right – that the nation's problem of racial discrimination was overcome with the passage of civil and voting rights legislation in the mid-1960s. As part of this process, historians have begun increasingly to reconsider the place of economic questions, principles and aspirations in African American and other minority groups' struggles against racial inequality. Although these three books are very different in form, content, and scope, they each reflect the growing importance of this line of inquiry within the historiography.