John McWhorter has a thoughtful response to my Root piece arguing that Wells Fargo's targeting of black folks for subprime loans proves that there are still systemic issues of racism to be dealt with:
Namely, a key factor here was a lack of knowledge on the part of the people who took these loans. The "racist" analysis will naturally seem wisdom incarnate to many, and more "interesting." But alone it carries a rather nauseating implication: that it is inevitable that poor black people will take mortgages that they can't afford.
It's more of the subtly internalized inferiority complex that elsewhere leads to conclusions such as that if black people don't do well on a test then the solution is to discount the test results.
John Bryant readily argues that part of what faces us is "financial illiteracy" and getting the word out to struggling people of color to not take such loans. This would be as effective a response to the problem as suing a bank.
John also writes that "discrimination today is of a radically different sort than what it used to be, not as central to what holds blacks back as it once was, and requiring different responses than what made sense fifty years ago." I'm not going to disagree at all that the nature of discrimination has fundamentally changed, and what we're facing now is not what black people once faced. The fact that black folks aren't being lynched however, doesn't mean that having a black name can't keep you from getting a job. Policies that disproportionately affect black folks unconsciously, rather than deliberately, are a slightly different question. One of my disagreements with John is that service organizations alone are better suited to handle the issue of policies that disproportionately affect black folks in a harmful way, deliberately or otherwise.
I am not buying into the "nauseating implication" that poor black people will inevitably take mortgages they can't afford. There were in fact, Community Development Financial Institutions, such as ShoreBank or Self-Help Credit Union, that were doing exactly the kind of work John is talking about: providing financial literacy classes, offering reputable fixed rate loans for businesses and homes. These institutions showed that it's entirely possible to provide fixed-rate mortgages even to people with less than perfect credit, it's just better done by local sources of capital that can better manage the risk and have a stake in how the surrounding community is affected, rather than institutions that are far away and therefore less concerned with the consequences of entire neighborhoods plummeting into default.
The problem was that the CDFIs were essentially crowded out of the market by the sheer volume of predatory lenders--and as the extent of the sub-prime crisis showed, it wasn't just black people who made bad choices. But because these loans were targeted at black folks regardless of credit history, they were disproportionately affected. Brokers and lenders will always have more knowledge than homebuyers, which is why better regulation of predatory lending is necessary for the country as a whole.
Pushing for such regulation should be the role of an advocacy organization like the NAACP. I agree that it's not enough for the NAACP to say a policy disproportionately affects black folks and call that racist, it should also explain why the policy is bad or counterproductive in general and provide an alternative that better serves the people it represents. With its still fairly large nationwide membership, chapter organization, and access to the black community, the NAACP is in a unique position to fill that role both at the state and federal level.
Also, despite how far we've come, there will still be moments where the NAACP needs to stand up for those who have been unjustly treated because they're black.
-- A. Serwer
