"Although credit scores never formally take race into account, they draw on data about personal borrowing and payment history that is shaped by generations of discriminatory public policies and corporate practices that limit access to wealth for Black and Latinx families."
This Black History Month (and into March), workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse have the power to keep making history by voting for their union.
"Black and Latinx borrowers [are] more likely to be denied credit than white borrowers and more likely to be charged higher interest rates [...]. [O]ne of many ways the financial deck is stacked against Black and brown consumers.”
The COVID-19 crisis has cast into stark relief what has always been true: the wealth and prosperity of the U.S. economy rests on the labor, and the lives, of black and brown communities.
Private credit reporting companies should be replaced by a publicly run credit registry that operates in the public interest and that automatically corrects for events like natural disasters and global health crises.
There have been devastating reports of disproportionate rates of death in Black communities as a result of COVID-19. Racial capitalism and structural racism are to blame.
“These are folks who are serving [and] preparing food for all of the rest of us. It's a recipe for contagion when...the people preparing your food cannot afford to stay home when they have a contagious disease.”
"Like in previous moments of crisis, whether it's the Great Depression or the 2008 financial crisis, we will need new governmental bodies to address the public needs at this scale."
Boosting the returns on homeownership for black families would reduce the wealth gap with white families by more than $17,000, or 16%, according to a 2015 report from the public-policy organization Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
Demos’s report details how historical and structural racism contributes to higher interest rates and insurance costs for Black and Latinx people, compared to white Americans.
So the next time Democrats complain about lower voter turnout, not just in 53206, but in any beleaguered neighborhood, they might think first about the policies, both old and new, that have served and continue to serve as stumbling blocks for black political participation.
In 2016, a report from the progressive think tank Demosfound that most campaign dollars in local elections were coming from contributors who are white, male and high-income.
Women of color are generally underrepresented as campaign donors even though they vote at high rates, according to research by progressive think tank Demos.