The White Wall
How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A deeply reported, “important, and infuriating” (The Guardian) look at the systemic racism inside the American financial services industry, from acclaimed New York Times finance reporter Emily Flitter.
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions.
Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders’ claims; and the systematic denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded by the systems they trusted with their money, and silenced when they attempted to speak out and seek reform.
Flitter connects the dots between data, history, legal scholarship, and powerful personal stories to provide a “must-read wake-up call” (Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, president of KNOWN Holdings) about what it means to bank while Black. As America continues to confront systemic racism and pave a path forward, The White Wall is an essential examination of one of its most caustic contributors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street's sexual harassment issues are well-known, but its racism has flown more under the radar, argues New York Times reporter Flitter in her searing debut. The racial wealth gap is only getting worse, she writes, and racism in banking and finance is "perhaps the devastating force that prevents Black Americans from gaining equal footing in the United States." Flitter presents disturbing stories of the systemic discrimination faced by Black bank account holders, mortgage applicants, and bankers themselves as they navigate hostile workplaces. Among the situations Flitter documents, insurers refused to pay out to Black policyholders; a Wells Fargo branch called the police on a woman trying to cash a check, suspecting it was fraudulent; employees at Edward Jones worked from "the kitchen table or car" with no office; and one financial firm asserted that "an employee's claim of discrimination could not be true because the firm had a policy of not tolerating discrimination." It's damning, and Flitter does a great job of explaining why things don't change: "People involved in the financial industry seem to rely on the fact that most people outside of it regard it as beyond their understanding." This evisceration of Wall Street's "private, ugly reality" packs a punch.
