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.
ISBN-13: 9781982183257
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Publication Date: 04-09-2024
Pages: 336
Emily Flitter covers banking and Wall Street for The New York Times. Before this, she spent eight years at Reuters, writing about politics, financial crimes, and the environment. Flitter holds an MA in Near Eastern studies and journalism from New York University and a BA from Wellesley College. She began her journalism career as a freelance reporter in Cairo. The White Wall is her first book.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1
1 Banking While Black 17
2 Mystery Shoppers 35
3 Ricardo and Jimmy 51
Part 2
4 The Truth About HR 79
5 Unsafe at Any Level 97
6 The Friendly Guy Next Door, Edward Jones 105
Part 3
7 How Insurance Works if You're Black (It Doesn't) 141
8 The Problem with the Machines 165
9 On the Diversity Circuit 193
Part 4
10 On Whitewashing 219
11 Reparations and the Big Banks 229
12 Making Pledges 253
13 What Wall Street Should Do 265
14 On Their Own 277
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 297
Index 309
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