{"id":142,"date":"2009-06-08T16:18:38","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T21:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.racismreview.com\/blog\/?p=2359"},"modified":"2009-06-08T16:18:38","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T21:18:38","slug":"systemic-racism-in-banking-the-wells-fargo-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/2009\/06\/08\/systemic-racism-in-banking-the-wells-fargo-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Systemic Racism in Banking: The Wells Fargo Case"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There is a piece <\/a>in the New York Times <\/em>today is reporting on their investigation into the explicitly racist practices of Wells Fargo in their subprime mortgage business (\"Creative<\/a> photo<\/a> credit: TheTruthAbout…<\/a><\/small> , h\/t Schiffon Wong). According to the NYTimes<\/em>,\u00a0 Wells Fargo created a unit in the mid-Atlantic region to push expensive refinancing loans on black customers, particularly those living in Baltimore, southeast Washington and Prince George\u2019s County, Md.<\/p>\n

\"wells<\/a>According to a former employee of the banking giant quoted in the article, the company viewed the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation\u2019s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as \u201cmud people\u201d and to subprime lending as \u201cghetto loans.\u201d\u00a0 The employee, a Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank\u2019s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally, goes on to reveal:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe just went right after them. Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The NYTimes<\/em> backs this anecdotal evidence with their own more systematic investigation:<\/p>\n

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The New York Times, in a recent analysis of mortgage lending in New York City, found that black households making more than $68,000 a year were nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as whites of similar or even lower incomes. (The disparity was greater for Wells Fargo borrowers, as 2 percent of whites in that income group hold subprime loans and 16.1 percent of blacks.<\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To understand the Wells Fargo case, it’s important to understand the broader context of this banking institutions’ policies as part of a larger pattern.<\/p>\n

Sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton in their ASA-award-winning book, American Apartheid<\/em><\/a>, document the systematic pattern of housing discrimination in the U.S., as well as the dire consequences of such enforced segregation.\u00a0\u00a0 Part of Massey and Denton’s argument is that segregation in housing leads to “social dislocations” (William J. Wilson’s term) in other areas like high school drop-out rates, increased rates of drug use, delinquency and crime, in other words, “the making of an underclass” (the subtitle of their book).<\/p>\n

Massey and Denton’s work was path-breaking for the way that it clearly and painstakingly documents the “construction of the ghetto,” but their findings were not exactly new.\u00a0 The Kerner Commission Report from 1968 <\/a>famously concluded:<\/p>\n

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“What white Americans have never fully understood\u2014 but what the Negro can never forget\u2014 is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The report from today’s NYTimes<\/em> and the evidence of explicitly racist practices of Wells Fargo do not mean that everyone that worked there agreed with these policies or harbored explicitly racist views.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva as recounted in his Racism Without Racists<\/em><\/a>, the continued operation of white supremacist system does not require the presence of extreme racists in that system.\u00a0 In fact, I’m sure that many of the people that worked at Wells Fargo would never consider themselves racists but rather well-meaning and liberal in their views on race.<\/p>\n

So, then it becomes necessary to understand Wells Fargo’s banking discrimination — and the housing segregation such discrimination creates — within an even broader context.\u00a0 For that, it’s important to understand the white racial frame that sustains systemic racism<\/a>, as Joe has described here and in his important book by the same name.\u00a0 Note the loan officer mentioned in the NYTimes<\/em> piece that <\/span> referred to blacks as \u201cmud people\u201d<\/em> and to the subprime lending as \u201cghetto loans.\u201d <\/em> These statements reflect thinking within the white racial frame and the result is the maintenance of systemic racial segregation in housing and further economic devastation of black families that might otherwise be homeowners.<\/p>\n

That’s the real tragedy of this story, to my thinking.\u00a0 Families that worked hard, tried to buy a home and provide a better life for their kids, are now facing foreclosure – and maybe worse – because of the systematic racism in Wells Fargo’s banking practices.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The question really becomes then if we, as a nation, are so “tragically bound to that starless midnight of racism,” as Dr. King said<\/a>, that we can never move beyond it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s time, I think, to begin holding institutions accountable for racist practices like these.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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The post Systemic Racism in Banking: The Wells Fargo Case<\/a> appeared first on racismreview.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TweetThere is a piece in the New York Times today is reporting on their investigation into the explicitly racist practices of Wells Fargo in their subprime mortgage business ( photo credit: TheTruthAbout… , h\/t Schiffon …<\/p>\n

The post Systemic Racism in Banking: The Wells Fargo Case<\/a> appeared first on racismreview.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1972,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[467,1324,29,488,586,36,82,524,1493],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-african-americans","category-banking","category-class","category-contexts","category-economic","category-economics","category-racism","category-systemic-racism","category-wells-fargo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1972"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":539,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/colorline\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}