The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America by Emily Flitter

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America by Emily Flitter An explosive and deeply reported 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, The White Wall 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 an assiduously reported, eye-opening look at 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. Hey, welcome to another episode. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. We're going to shock and amaze you.

We've got an explosive author and book on the show today, on a hot new book that's coming to presses are near you or bookstores as well. And we're going to be talking with Emily Flitter. She is an amazing New York Times journalist. But in the meantime, refer the show to your family, friends, relatives. Remember, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your family does. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss.

The big LinkedIn groups, the big LinkedIn newsletter, all the things we do over there on LinkedIn as well. Check that out. And we're also trying to post stuff on TikTok. We're trying to be cool. So help us out over there. Give us some likes and help us be cool. If you have any tips on how to be cool, let us know because I'm still working on it. Anyway, she is the amazing author of the newest, hottest book that's coming out

on October 25th, 2022. And of course, guess what? That's today, folks. Where did this year go? We interviewed somebody yesterday who's got a book coming out January 2023. Crazy, man. This year just went right by me. But you want to order up this book today. Hot off the presses. White Wall. How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America. Emily Flitter is the author. She'll be on the show with us today. Anyway, welcome to the show. I think we're still in Monday game. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Well, you can find me on Twitter at the handle Flitter on Fraud. There you go. Flitter on Fraud.

I like that. So what motivated you want to write this book? I started looking into the issue of racial discrimination at big banks. And I thought it would just be a story or two. And the more I looked, the more I found. And I also was nudged really hard by people whose full-time job it is to handle stuff like this. And in particular, I met a lawyer who has sued every major bank in class action suits, you know, on behalf of black employees. And she said, she said to me, you know, people focus on gender discrimination. At this point, it was the Me Too, the height of the Me Too era in late 2017, early 2018. And she was like, racial discrimination is so much worse. And I tried to get her to tell me which bank was really bad. And she was like, no, you don't get it. It's everywhere and nobody pays attention to it. So I just made it my mission to pay attention to it. There you go. There you go. So you got digging on some of the leads that you'd gotten on this

and what did you find? Well, the first thing that happened was a J.P. Morgan Chase employee came to me with just incredible cache of recordings that he made of his boss saying racist stuff. Wow. And it wasn't just his boss saying racist stuff. He documented everything that happened to him when he tried to complain about being a victim of discrimination. He was a black man, and he really was very astute in figuring out how he could prove what so many other people think is happening to them, but they can't get past the gaslighting. Because when he complained to JP Morgan, they basically just, they said, we take these complaints really seriously. And then they just tried to bury him. They accused him of doing something wrong. And they told him that they didn't have any record of his discrimination complaint until after they had already started investigating him. And it just turned into this whole mess. And that's what happens a lot. But it's so rare that somebody just has the presence of mind to

record everything at the right time, the way Ricardo Peters did. That was his name. So that kicked off a whole bunch of, you know, sayings and became the book. What was it like listening to those tapes and listening to, it sounds like a bunch of guys sitting around being racist and saying racist stuff and, you know. Well, the heartbreaking moment in Ricardo's recording of his boss is when Ricardo is trying to say to his boss, I found this great client and I want to manage her money. And the client he's talking about is the woman who had received a settlement from a municipality over the death of her son. So it was really sad she had about four hundred thousand dollars in the settlement and she had come to ricardo and opened a chase account to keep the

money and ricardo wanted to help her death and row it and his boss said and the woman was laughing away and his boss said you're not investing a dime for this lady she doesn't risk this isn't money she respects she didn't earn it she's from section eight and work to his boss but i thought that was my job is to assure how we you know how to to preserve and grow the money. I thought that was my whole job. And he said, no, you're not investing in a dime. And hearing that was the way Ricardo is confused before he just kind of realizes what his boss is really saying. He's like, wait a minute.

That's really what breaks my heart every time I hear it. Well, calling Section 8 and all that stuff, I mean, it sounds like a present maybe we had to use to give off. One of those things, you know, they say things that are signals and stuff. Just crazy. I mean, this must have been just nuts to take and listen to. And, you know, here I thought, you know, we've had a number of inclusivity, inclusion officers on the show. We've talked about inclusion. A lot of companies have adopted inclusion officers and inclusion aspects into their human resources and manuals and stuff.

And it's surprising how endemic this stuff still is in corporate culture. Well, it's funny that you talk about the steps that companies have taken because that's, in a way, part of the problem. Here's the problem. We don't acknowledge the reality that racism is alive and well and embedded in our institutions. And because we don't acknowledge that problem, we end up almost pantomiming solutions to something that we're not even really willing to talk about. And that pantomime can actually hurt. And so one of the things that I learned about in doing this book is that companies want to be able to say that they have policies and procedures in place to prevent racism. They want to say we have zero tolerance for racism. But actually saying that is way more important to them than implementing those policies. In fact,

what the real policy is when they implement it is just incredible defensiveness that hurts the victim of the discrimination and just protects the company with a kind of a scorched earth result. Yeah. Did some of the tapes sound like, did some of the tapes sound like, you know, some sort of Wolf of Wall Street sweatshop sort of crap going on? You know, I can see why you would imagine that. And there is a recording that I that I write about in the book where Bank in the South, the name of the bank right now is Cadence Bank. This is its previous name was Bank Corp South. They were being investigated by the Justice Department for redlining. They didn't want to make mortgages to Black people. Really, really simply, they did not want to. And somebody actually recorded a room full of loan officers talking to their boss.

And the way that you imagine saying things like, you know, they need to pay their bills on time. Ha ha ha. And somebody saying like, well, don't say the N word. And so, yes. So the answer, the short answer is, and we're talking, we're not talking 50 years ago. We're not even talking 10 years ago. This is what happens even now. The JP Morgan recordings didn't show that, but that doesn't, you know, just, that's actually another point I'd like to make. There's the cartoonish racist stuff

that everybody wants to imagine, but there's all kinds of other stuff that's just as bad. And just because people aren't saying the N wordword or saying some other horrible thing doesn't mean that there isn't a racist or biased, you know, force that's present and that's hurting people. Yeah, the gentleman who recorded those recordings, you know, they probably didn't say what they say back in the boys' room when they all get together because he was, you know, he was witnessing it in front of them. You know, I, I know how sometimes people will be on their best behavior when they're around other folks, but then they'll get back with the boys and they'll just start hating on,

on people. You know, we had, we had, and start saying, you know, the quiet part out loud. We had a glad junior on the show a couple of years ago and we talked how endemic racism is between our freeways, our neighborhoods, the way they're set up, you know, just it's going to take hundreds of years to just unravel this all. Even once we get to a point where we can, you know, take on racism on the head and prejudice, it's so everywhere. And, you know, I had a mortgage company for 20 years in Utah, you know, redlining was a big thing, equal credit, equal loaning, all that sort of good stuff. And I was a real estate agent for six years.

You know, that was a big deal. They always have to teach us about redlining. And you learn about how these banks, going back to Jim Crow, when redlining, of course, helped create these areas of poverty in these neighborhoods and, you know, between commercial and residential, you know, everything with racial division. And it's just extraordinary. Did you find that it's more prevalent in big finance or is it more dangerous in big finance because of the effect they have on like neighborhoods and different things like this and money and wealth when it

comes to, you know, that's the one thing black people struggle to have is generational wealth that gets passed down. Of course, we destroyed a lot of that up until the 60s. Well, that's the thing. I don't think we stopped. And that's the problem. I don't think the institution size matters so much, but it is a big problem across the board because, and again, my book, the way it's set up, it's designed to make this point and to show you the individual components that go into this big picture. And the big picture is that there are all different barriers that Black Americans face to building generational wells and preserving it and passing it down. And I basically saw that, I saw that as a wall. And then I wanted to look at the bricks. And so the bricks are these different components of the

banking system. They are anything from what happens when you're black and you walk into a bank and the tellers start profiling you and thinking that you're going to rob them or whatever to if you're an employee and you can't get justice and you can't get promoted and you can't get paid you know the same rate to insurance insurance is a really big one actually and if you were really in in real estate then you must know a little bit about this. Insurers don't write policies that are equal everywhere. They have their bad neighborhoods. So if you're living in one of those neighborhoods that they've decided has a lot of fraud or is of low value, you're often living in a majority black neighborhood. They have been devalued since the Jim Crow era. And even though redlining is illegal, insurers actually still do it all the

time. They just don't, you know, they don't have like a policy that says we're redlining, but the effects of what they do are very similar. And then they also really, really make it hard for Black insurance claimants to get paid. So if you have an insurance policy and you try to make a claim, you're going to get questioned, sometimes deposed under oath about what really happened because it it's just such a, it's an industry where there's a lot of discretion that's left up to individuals and their own racial biases come out and they make it really hard for people to collect the money that they are owed. So that's another way that it's really hard to build and keep

generational wealth if you're black. That's extraordinary. You know, I have black friends and they talk about how every day they go through, you know, just 10s, 20s, you know, they understand what's going on. They understand they can feel it. They understand when they come across someone who's racist and they see the game that's being played and it stacks and it's frustrating. They'll talk to me about how frustrating it is and how maddening it is. And, of course, they can't, you know, one of my friends talked to me and he said,

you know, I can't flip out like you guys do. I can't, when it becomes too much, I can't go full Karen. I can't, you know, flip out because then if I flip out, then everyone goes, ah, yeah, see, see, you know, this is, this is why we're racist and prejudice because they flip out. And, you know, that's what he told me. He goes, I can't, I can't do what you guys do. Like, and he goes, it's even more offensive when I see you guys stand up for yourselves and say, no, we're not putting up with this crap. And, you know, if some bank teller gives me a hustle, then, you know, I'm like, I want my money now or whatever. And he goes, he goes, we see you guys do it and we can't act that way because then

if we act that way, then it gets worse. And of course then, you know, the cops show up, you get tasered, you, you end up with a foot on your neck and all the other horrors that we've seen over the last few years with police things. It can really go bad fast. And it does. I mean, you called, you know, there's a lot of black families that call officers to the home for maybe, you know, a simple domestic thing. And it turns into a loved one. So, you know, they, they, he, my friend described how he feels that, you know, it holds him in. And so, you know, you can't fix it. You can't deal with it.

But you know what's going on. They're not, you know, they're not unaware that, wow, I didn't know that this was going on. You know, that's really interesting to me because I always wonder whenever I moved around Las Vegas, which is a huge city and huge county, and I moved around for 20 years or so, and I always wondered how come every time I changed zip codes that I'm still in the valley of Las Vegas, the county of Las Vegas, Clark County. But I'm like, how come my insurance bill changes so much? I'm like, just my auto. Yep. And it never occurred to me what you found in your book. Yeah.

I could write a whole book on just insurance. One of the problems with the industry is that there's no federal regulator that's in charge of overseeing insurers. They're regulated by states and no state has the money and resources that it takes to really scrutinize the companies. And they get away with a lot and they don't have to share a lot of data about what they're doing. So they're just operating with basically very little to no accountability. And this is what they want to do. It's really incredible. Yeah. It's interesting to me. You mentioned it comes down to even the frontline, the very frontline. And if they're prejudiced and stuff like the bank tellers right at the beginning.

So it can go all the way from the executives at the top to anywhere in between and have an effect. You know, I honestly thought that we dealt a lot with racism. I was foolish to believe this when we elected Obama as president. I was like, okay, well, we're making some really good progress here. And then we went back the other way, as President Obama calls it, zig and zag. This country moves back and forth. And I went, wow, okay, this country moves back and forth. And I went, wow, okay, I thought we'd done that. And then, you know, on January 6th, you saw the Confederate flag in Congress when they attacked the Capitol. And I remember looking at that. I'm still just stunned

to this day to see that flag in the Capitol that never, ever got that far with the Confederate Civil War. And it made me realize, it hit me like a ton of bricks, that we have not resolved the Civil War. And we're still in this racial battle. In that case, people died. And people are proponents of violence right now, suggesting that, you know, we need violence and fascist authoritarianism sort of attacks. And if you study history, you understand what all this leads to on the train that we're on right now. So you found insurance companies do the same thing. And I imagine it's the same thing. It can go all the way from the insurance executives down to the agent at your local insurance office. Yeah. I mean, the way insurance works,

you have the agent who sells policies and then you have claims adjusters who do the investigation and figure out who is of what when somebody makes a claim. And the agents are trying to sort of by nature of the business pay as little as possible to people. And what I found, as you mentioned, it's not just that it's one person who is biased. It's that the whole system takes the bias that is in most people and actually exploits it to the company's benefit. That means that you tell the adjusters, you know, you should be suspicious. And if you think this person is lying, like really take them to the mat. But what I found with State Farm, for instance, and actually some of this is in my book and some of it I've found since I wrote the book, and you can read my stories about it in the New York Times, I found that State Farm actually appeared to have a policy of sending claims that came out of majority Black neighborhoods to a special investigation unit where leaders were telling the investigators there is a lot of fraud in these neighborhoods. So, I mean, when you say

this goes to the top, it really does. It's an institutional thing. It's not just like you've got one bad apple and the bad apple can be weeded out. And I think it's really important to make that distinction because these companies want you to think every time you hear a story about something horrible, like what I reported about with the JP Morgan Chase employee, they want you to think that this is just, you know, not everyone can be good. There's always going to be a bad actor. It's not like that. It's not isolated. It happens everywhere. And it won't change unless the leaders of these companies start to realize how embedded this is and take actual steps to change their cultures.

Yeah. Do you, I know this is an obvious, this is kind of a question that is obvious, but how many years would you project that it would take to get this out of our system, to clean it up? Does it need regulation? Do you make any suggestions of regulation in the book? How endemic is this to a point that how many years would you project it would take to get it out if we were to go through some sort of policies or some sort of legislation that would fight it? in the book, which is not the only thing that these companies should be doing, but it's a big

thing, is that the companies should embrace the movement and the effort to get this country, the government, to pay reparations. And my argument, which actually isn't, this is not my idea. This is the idea that I embraced after doing a lot of reporting. It has come from people far smarter than I. The thinking is, if corporate America embraces reparations and lobbies for as a concept and as a program, then you will have real power and real money behind it and you can actually get legislation passed. What I also believe is that you can change the cultures internally of the companies if the company's public position has to support reparations. The company is going to have to explain to its employees why it need reparations. There's so little understanding of our history that just having to publicly accept that position, stand up for it, and turn around and explain it to your employees, I think would go a long way to changing the culture at these companies. And so I guess,

to answer your question, I'm not going to put a number on it because I have no idea, but I don't think that this is something that's intractable. I don't think it's going to put a number on it because I have no idea. But I don't think that this is something that's intractable. I don't think it's going to take hundreds of years or even decades. I think we could make a lot of big changes really quickly. But first, we have to cut the crap. You know what I mean? We have to stop bullshitting ourselves. Yeah, we definitely do. And your book helps bring a shine of light to that. It doesn't seem like the penalties of lawsuits are enough because, you know, the attorney you initially spoke with about this goes around and sues these companies. And evidently, even the penalties of those financial losses still don't compel them. You're right. The settlements that these lawsuits produced

may have restored some of the damages that the employees experienced who were in the lawsuits, but they didn't do anything really to change the courses of the companies. In fact, in some cases, there were terms that the banks had to meet. When Morgan Stanley comes to mind, they actually had a monitor, somebody who was appointed by the judge to come in and make sure that the bank was behaving better toward its black employees. And what I found through my reporting was that while the monitor was in place, things got maybe a little marginally better. And then when the monitoring period ended, everything just went back to the way it was. So these lawsuits, I'm not saying they shouldn't happen because they're the only way we know about this stuff, but there's no, well, you know what? Let me take, let me qualify that a little bit. Linda, Linda Friedman, the lawyer who we've been talking about, if you asked her what the lawsuits did, she would say 30 years ago, there were no black employees, not enough to form a class at some of these companies and now at least there are enough black employees that when you have a class action

complaint you can get it certified because there are enough people to form a class you need 40 i think and she thinks that's progress it's it's like little incremental bits and progress i think that we just need a huge cultural change and that this progress is way too slow. Yeah, it's just amazing to me when I sit and I think about it, because we've had a lot of great authors on the show that have talked about this problem. In fact, it was a big topic back in the George Floyd killing, and a lot of great authors and books documented what's going on and addressed it and tried to shine a light on this issue. And it's great that you've done this as well, especially in the detail you have. You even found that a lot of from everyone from single mothers to professional athletes to employees, they get scammed.

They get defrauded by people that they trusted with their money. So people rip them off, I guess, financial advisors and things of that nature? Well, I think everybody is, you know, at risk of getting scammed. The real ripoff comes from the everyday business that these innocent people are prevented from doing because of their race. At the core, do we just need to teach anti-racism, teach what racism is and how to not embrace it? People aren't born into racism. They're taught it. I've had this discussion with authors on the show and said, do we need to have a better education system in our things that teaches what racism is, how to avoid it, be more inclusive? You know, a lot of these people, they get it from their parents. They get it from their parents or sometimes their environment.

I see a lot of it in gaming. You know, I mean, in our gaming groups that we have, I feel like huge discords and stuff for gaming. You know, the use of the N-word is rampant, and we have to ban it. We've had to have Sony come in and erase a bunch of people and get them blocked and get them in trouble. It's just rampant how much of it's out there in that environment that makes it seem okay. But I think a lot of it comes from their parents. And I don't know, maybe somehow we have to cut it off to me at the beginning of the core. I agree with you when you say we need to do a lot more stuff up at the higher levels.

But it almost seems like somehow we could squash it when it first gives birth in young people when they, you know, they click over. When they decide that, hey, I'm going to start adopting some of these racist sort of tropes and habits and and and uh and uh you know stuff they they say yeah i mean we we absolutely like i i think we need better like education across the board i think we need to i mean you're kind of drawing me into an area where i'm not an expert I'm an expert in the financial system. I have traveled all over the country, though. I covered the 2016 election, and I went to a lot of political rallies and absolutely felt like we could do a way better job in this country teaching history and civics and, you know, preparing people to be in society

better than we do, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. Even I, the day after Trump won election, I had to sit down and I was trying to understand what happened. I was like reading over all the election numbers and hearing about this white nationalism that I'd never heard about. And I was like, you know, great newspapers like yours started newspapers.

Not sure anyone knows what those are anymore, right? You know, I still remember reading the New York Times. And I still like newspaper. I grew up with the comics. That was my first rendition of growing up was reading the comics. And my dad was a newspaper flinger. He put them in the coin boxes that would be on every corner in L.A. But I still remember, you know, reading about the newspaper and finding out about all this stuff that went on.

I've lost myself in the segue. I went totally back to my childhood. That's not the segue, what I was doing. But it's something that I think we all need to address. Oh, I remember reading in newspapers like yours where they would talk about what white nationalism was and now it was just rebranded KKK. And then I started realizing some of those words, those, those, those, those words that Trump was using and the people from the white nationalists were using and the branding they were using, you know, like our heritage and, you know, different, the different keywords they use, the tropes keywords they use. And I didn't realize, cause some of them were in my vocabulary and I didn't realize that

they were being used or weaponized in that way. And so then I had to go do a house cleaning on my own world and go, do I use any of these words? Cause these are not cool words anymore because these guys are weaponized them and use them for racial tropes. And do I, do I have racism in me? do i need to look harder at you know maybe is there any sort of you know prejudice that i have that i'm i'm maybe giving off or that i i maybe have an address that that maybe i need to learn more about of course i did that with george floyd where i had to

kind of look inside and go you know how do we get here? And do I need to be a better person? And what do I need to do? talk about this book and the work that I did on it is that if you read this book and you're Black, you're like, oh yeah, I have my own stories like this. Everybody who has had to live this experience knows that what's in the book is real and it's a real problem. White people, including myself, do not have to deal with this on a daily basis. And I think that some of the times when I'm talking about this book and I'm talking about it with another white person, that person feels like, oh my God, what does all this mean for my sense of who I am? Am I good or am I bad? And I don't think that we need to dwell on trying to label good and bad people. I think we need to turn our attention away from ourselves and onto the people who suffer this unfortunate reality and just think

more about their experiences. I mean, what can we, like, the more we think about that the more we can see ways where we can be more compassionate because on the on the flip side i don't think anyone who is racist goes around thinking like oh yeah i'm a racist like i've met a lot of people who like are totally racist and they're like no i'm not a not a racist. It doesn't matter. You don't need to probe yourself and find an answer to the question. All you need to do is open your heart and your mind to the experiences of other people and take an extra second and think about how am I in the habit of judging what I see? And if I stop with the judgment for an extra second, is that going to make this whatever situation I'm in better? Is it going to diffuse a conflict? Is it going to make me a more compassionate person. We all want to be good, right? I mean, aside from, you know,

somebody who's like, my name is Dr. Evil and I love being evil. Like all of us want to be good. We want to like be good in society and we want to make people feel good. And I think we all can. And the more we just think about other people, especially who are are like i said victims of this oppressive system the the better we can all be i think yeah it it's i totally agree with you i it you know broke my heart when my friend told me what kind of his experience in depth of what it's like to to go through every day and he's, sometimes it's hundreds of times a day, Chris. It can be something, a casual comment, something says to me. It could be, you know, bank teller.

It could be some sort of thing, you know. You have to live in constant fear of calling the police or interactions with the police officer. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who, you know, he sent me some videos about some nuttiness with the coronavirus vaccination and stuff. And, you know, I had to say, hey, dude, that's, you know, that's nutty conspiracy stuff you got there. Don't listen to that. And the interesting thing was he cited to me, he goes, well, you know, there was some Philadelphia experiments 10 or 20 years ago.

I'm not sure what he referenced on black people. There was the, of course, the thing in the 50s or the 60s where they did experiments and, you know, other horrific medical things that you can cite through all throughout history, sadly. And, you know, that was leading him into a place where he was buying into some really conspiracy stuff that's probably also racially manipulative as to what the idea was pushing. And, of course, the black community has suffered probably the worst from the coronavirus and all the fallout that comes from it and, you know, them not getting vaccinated or health-wise them not seeking medical help. So, you know, it spreads and it's so endemic and so thick in our society.

But I think you're right. We all need to have a better understanding, better empathy for each other and try and just make the world a better place. Lastly, as we go out, I'm sure you probably reached out to JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, some of the other people who write about in the book. What were some of the information that they didn't respond about on the record, you know, in a way that I could say that, say what they said. And there were other responses that they gave me that were on the record and I could put them in the book. And so I'm just going to give you an example because it really like there's, you know, there was a lot to talk about. One of the things that I found that I put in the book were these emails that showed JPMorgan Chase tellers racially profiling bank customers who would walk in. And that's how the book starts is with some of the

emails that I read. So when I went to Chase and I said, what do you have to say about these emails? I thought that the spokeswoman's response was incredibly revealing. First, she said, we see this a lot in all industries, including the media, where there's unnecessary racial profiling. Okay, yes, I don't really see how attacking my industry is going to help this, just your um just your response but like fine you're right but then she said unnecessary use of racial race to use race in the descriptor to stop crime, it's not a problem. And I thought that was a really sort of interesting way to put it because it was almost justifying this and also not really responding to the part of my question which was if race is so necessary then how come all of the people who aren't black don't get described as white you

know what i mean like and also how how come their behavior is described and in the case of some of the black customers who are describing these emails it's just a description of what they look like and then then it says the teller didn't trust their check or something. And so I didn't really get a good answer. And I think that really speaks to the problem. That's interesting. It's kind of a, she kind of gave you a, is whataboutism the right word? Where it's like, well, everyone does it.

Yeah. That's kind of like the response she gave. Every industry does it. So why are we bad? And you're just like, wow. Let me ask you this really quickly here at the end. I owned a mortgage company for up to 20 years, and I understood all this stuff. I lived in Utah, which is largely predominantly, I think, 97% white.

And they have neighborhoods and areas in the state that have issues with, they're kind of racially charged. And I think they've had some redlining that have gone on there. But I remember looking at my, you know, everyone has to sign the equal rights law page, which I think is good. There's a fair lending page that everyone has to sign by, I think that was put in the 70s or late 60s. But I always thought it was interesting at the 70s or late 60s. But I always thought it was interesting at the end of all of our loan applications, there was a part there where you had to describe, you had to describe your race and it was optional. You could just say, I don't want to describe this, but you could describe the race of the person. And I always thought, you know,

when this goes to the people who process the loans and approve the loans and stuff, I wonder if, you know, this is, I understand why it's there because it's good for tracking and, you know, being able to see if fair lending practices and equal rights practices are being, are being, are being done well and maybe it fights redlining. But I also thought, you know, if you check that box telling me what your race is and it goes to a processor or a loan application person that maybe is racist, they're going to know who you are. You know, we've already seen too where, you know, I know that my friends in the employment business and some of the inclusion officers that come on, you know, they've found that people will be prejudiced and identify race based upon names

on resume applications. Do you find that maybe that had any implication in checking those boxes so they did a different race? Well, I actually think, I think you're talking about HMDA data, right? The Mortgage Disclosure Act. So HMDA is a really important law that says that banks should disclose lots of information about all of their mortgage borrowers where they do a mortgage loan or any kind of home loan and yeah i think it's good like like we have to keep track of of who's getting what loan and we're not at a point where everybody gets the same terms it's not fair and humda helps us figure out how unfair it is and help us track that. So I actually have a section in my book where I talk about the importance of

being aware that when you are building an algorithm now that's supposed to help with credit decisions, that the data that you're feeding into it is actually skewed by all of the past bias that existed in earlier points in time when the data was created. And Honda is a really good sort of way to track that. There are problems when banks don't report race. It then sort of like sets a baseline for what's okay, that the baseline itself is not accurate. So I didn't find in my reporting that the existence of the HMDA reporting requirement actually caused a problem. In fact, a lot of fair lending folks, you rely on HMDA because they have no other way of knowing how fairly or unfairly any group is being treated. And actually,

I would add one more thing to that. There's a really big push by civil rights activists now to get a HMDA-like requirement put in place for business loans, because Black business owners get far less money from banks in small business loans. They have such a hard time. And you only know this through anecdotal or privately designed studies. You don't know it from government data the way you do with mortgages. So it's just even hard to define the problem. Wow. It'd be interesting to see how this applies to Silicon Valley. That might be a next book for you if you didn't get into that. Yeah, I have one chapter on AI, but again, like I say in the book, actually in the beginning of the book, there really need to be like 60 books written on this.

So I just took the first crack and I hope there are a lot more to follow. There you go. It's endemic in our society and each one of us, I think, needs to do a journey of self-finalization, of empathy, and try and figure out how we can stomp away this beast. I mean, it's kind of like the same for our democracy. Each one of us are stewards of it. And if we're going to make a better world, we each have to work hard to do that within ourselves. And, you know, as Bobby Kennedy said in South Africa, you know, each of us has the power to a wall of, of, of, of a wave that can tear down the mightiest of walls. And so hopefully we can all go through

that, but the education is what we need first. And thank you, Emily, for sharing this data and writing this book. And hopefully it will be one of the proponents of change that can get us down that road. Amen, Chris. Thank you so much for, for letting me talk about the book. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. And we appreciate having talk about the book. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. And we appreciate having you on. Emily, give me your dot coms if people can find you on the interwebs, please. The best place to find me is on Twitter.

I'm at Flitter on Fraud. That's my handle. And that has my email address in it, too. My New York Times email. There you go. I noticed your recent article on October 24th yesterday. Cain West's offensive behavior is kind of interesting. Adidas finally pulled the plug. I think it was today or last night.

Yes. Yeah, there you go. Very interesting. Thank you very much, Emily, for being on the show. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Order up the book, share with your friends and family, your book club, get everyone involved, and let's overcome racism if we can, please, folks. Let's try and make baby steps to get there and adult steps. How are we going to get there? Let's take it on the nose. The White Wall, How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America. Order up. It's available today wherever fine books are sold. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.

And that should have us out, Emily.