Category Archives: Banking and Financial Policies

Establish a Public Credit Registry | Demos

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“Credit reports and scores directly impact Americans’ economic security and opportunity. Credit history can affect the way Americans are treated by lenders, landlords, utility companies, hospitals and employers. Having a poor credit history or a “thin file” with insufficient credit information to generate a credit score can mean a consumer will end up paying more for loans and insurance (or have trouble even getting them in the first place). Misuses of credit history are prevalent and harmful: Job seekers can be denied work based on their credit history, and the Trump administration has even proposed using credit history to determine whether immigrants should be eligible for permanent residency. Most harmfully, our credit system is built on—and continues to reinforce and expand—deep racial inequities.  Generations of discrimination in employment, lending, education and housing have produced significant racial disparities in credit history. Past discrimination is baked into current determinations of creditworthiness: Credit scores and other lending algorithms disproportionately represent black and Latino loan applicants as “riskier” customers. As a result, decisions drawing on credit data reproduce and spread existing racial inequality, making it harder to achieve true economic equity.”

Source: Establish a Public Credit Registry | Demos

There were nearly a million black farmers in 1920. Why have they disappeared? | Environment | The Guardian

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Today there are just 45,000 African American farmers. One man is fighting to save them.

Source: There were nearly a million black farmers in 1920. Why have they disappeared? | Environment | The Guardian

How Redlining Continues to Hold Back Black Americans

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To understand racism in America, one must first disabuse themselves of the idea that race is a social construct—an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.

Source: How Redlining Continues to Hold Back Black Americans

The Racist Dawn of Capitalism | Boston Review

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“At the heart of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told is the claim that the profits and accumulations of slavery contributed to the formation of contemporary capitalism. Like Beckert, he turns to the history of the cotton industry, though he focuses on the United States from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War. Yet if Beckert’s story is the world the slave owners made, Baptist’s is the world made by the slave. “Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States,” he declares, “and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.” We know the claim that enslaved African Americans built the modern United States is not new. This “half” has, in fact, been told—multiple times and more often than not by black writers, some of whom are fleetingly mentioned in Baptist’s footnotes. But the claim that African Americans built the world is simply wrong. Baptist’s book is marked by such rhetorical excesses, which lend themselves to a blinkered and narcissistic American exceptionalism. The result is an oversimplified view of capitalism and slavery that ignores the historical contributions to modernity of Africans in the Caribbean and in Africa itself.”

Source: The Racist Dawn of Capitalism | Boston Review

Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide – Inequality.org

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The deep and persistent racial wealth divide will not close without bold, structural reform.  It has been created and held in place by public policies that have evolved with time including slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, mass incarceration, among many others. The racial wealth divide is greater today than it was nearly four decades ago and trends point to its continued widening.

Source: Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide – Inequality.org

Many People are Too Broke for Bankruptcy. A New Report Suggests Some Fixes. — ProPublica

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All sorts of bad things happen when bankruptcy is out of reach for people, as we showed in a series of stories. People turn to unscrupulous operators who file phony bankruptcy cases, as happens often in Los Angeles. Particularly in the South, they turn to a form of bankruptcy that features a payment plan and that often ends in failure, leaving debtors worse off than when they filed. (African Americans are especially prone to that problem.) And finally, many people don’t file at all — and just hope that a debt collector doesn’t seize their wages.

Source: Many People are Too Broke for Bankruptcy. A New Report Suggests Some Fixes. — ProPublica

Trump’s Man on the Inside at the IRS | DCReport.org

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Charles Rettig is Running the Tax Agency for One Reason Only—To Keep His Boss’s Returns Locked Up

“Unless they are too brazen or clumsy, very rich tax cheats with very good lawyers get to deal with their tax offenses behind closed doors.  As a criminal tax defense lawyer once told me, “I get paid to save people from indictments for their tax crimes by settling cases before their names go into the public record.”

 

Source: Trump’s Man on the Inside at the IRS | DCReport.org

Racism Knocking at the Door: the Use of Criminal Background Checks in Rental Housing – Race, Racism and the Law

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Racism Knocking at the Door: the Use of Criminal Background Checks in Rental Housing

In 2016, after decades of appearing to encourage local public housing providers to adopt harsh policies barring applicants with criminal records, the Office of General Counsel for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) issued guidance instructing public and private housing providers to take in to account the potentially disparate effects of such policies on racial minorities (the “HUD Guidance”). Recognizing that African Americans and Latinos are “arrested, convicted and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population,” HUD advised that any policy that “restricts access to housing on the basis of criminal history” may have an unlawful disparate impact based on race.

 

Source: Racism Knocking at the Door: the Use of Criminal Background Checks in Rental Housing – Race, Racism and the Law

Baby Bonds: A Plan for Black/White Wealth Equality Conservatives Could Love?

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Baby Bonds: A Plan for Black/White Wealth Equality Conservatives Could Love?

By Lynn Parramore

OCT 25, 2016 | RACE  

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

 

JOIN THE INSTITUTE IN DETROIT FOR A CONFERENCE ON RACE & ECONOMICS, NOV. 11-12.

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How Amazon Has Made Money Off Racism And Hate

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Even seemingly innocent products on the platform, like children’s books or toys, have promoted hateful ideologies.
headshot By Michelle Lou
Although the Southern Poverty Law Center says it has alerted Amazon to sellers who sell hate group material, the company has not always been receptive to completely eliminating these sellers.

Amazon is enabling and profiting from hate groups and ideologies, according to a damning report released on Friday.

The report, “Delivering Hate: How Amazon’s Platforms Are Used to Spread White Supremacy, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia,” details a variety of ways that hate groups take advance of Amazon’s massive platforms and inconsistently enforced policies. Two advocacy groups ― Partnership for Working Families and Action Center on Race and the Economy ― compiled the study.

 

When asked about the report, Amazon referred HuffPost to its official guidelines, which prohibit the selling of “products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views.”

The hangman's noose is "one of the most powerful visual symbols directed against African-Americans," according to the Anti-De

But critics say that this policy often doesn’t reflect reality.

Amazon’s approximately 300 million active customers can encounter products that feature hate symbols and hateful language on Amazon Marketplace, which has allowed racist, Islamophobic, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic groups to sell merchandise.

The report found items for sale that included a costume of a lynching victim, a hangman’s noose decal, Nazi memorabilia and children’s toys featuring alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.

 

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