ABSTRACT
Individual prejudice and institutional/systemic prejudice both exist, and often intersect. Ironically, the banking industry is one of the arenas where bias is a documented pattern. Astonishingly, the homeownership gap is bigger between blacks and whites now than it was during segregation. Some of this is rooted in historical practices that have since been illegalized, such as the “redlining” policy of the US Government Home Owners Loan Corporation during the Great Depression, which intentionally prevented lending to “neighborhoods infiltrated by negroes.” Discriminatory lending practices have been documented as recently as during the pandemic. One imagines that after a sigh of relief over dodging the potential legal and public relations bullet, the institution returned to business as usual.
