- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on IdeaStream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, January 13th and I'm Artis Arnold, member of the City Club Board of Directors and Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Huntington National Bank.

Today's forum is part of The City Club's Authors and Conversation series and I am pleased to introduce Emily Flitter, journalist with the New York Times and author of "The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America."

On Monday, January 16th, our country will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as well as reflect on the work that remains towards civil rights and racial equality.

After centuries of targeted and racist policies that set black and brown Americans behind, the racial wealth gap between white and black families has grown.

According to the Federal Reserve, in 2021, the average black household earned about half as much as the average white household and owned about 15 to 20 percent as much net wealth.

These disparities have only fueled more inequalities in communities of color.

Yet for many black and brown Americans, the solution to improving wealth like access to capital, getting a home appraised or even access to standard banking services can be challenging.

Just last year, film director Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame was denied by police while withdrawing cash from his own account.

And in California, a black family, excuse me, in California, a black couple made national news when their home appraisal rose by nearly half a million dollars after they had their white friend show their home instead.

Hmm.

As a former 12 year veteran on Wall Street, I welcome today's conversation.

As a native Clevelander and having no prior connections on Wall Street, I hope today's conversation will be enlightening to those who aspire or are currently pursuing a career in the financial service industry.

Despite the diversity challenges that persist on Wall Street, I still believe this is one of the greatest institutions in America and can still serve as a viable path for communities of color to build life-changing wealth for our families and communities.

Our speaker today has spent the last five years, covering banking in Wall Street for the New York Times.

Before this, she spent eight years at Reuters, writing about politics, financial crimes and the environment.

Through her work, Emily Flitter has amassed countless stories, like Ryan Coogler's and the couple from California.

In her book, she outlines how this systematic racism inside the American financial service industry can serve as yet another barrier for black Americans, and not only for banking customers, but also internal employment practices at the banks themselves.

Also joining us on stage is Danielle Sydnor immediate past president of the NAACP Cleveland Branch, Sydnor, Sydnor, apologies.

Sydnor, immediate past president of the NAACP Cleveland branch, founder and CEO of We Win Strategies Group and a former financial advisor with deep experience in the sector.

She will serve as a moderator for today's conversation.

If you have questions for our co-speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your question @thecityclub and the City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me and welcome Emily and Danielle.

Danielle.

(audience applauding) - So Emily, thanks for making it to snowy Cleveland, today.

How was your drive up?

- It was harrowing, but I am so happy to be here.

(laughs) - We know what the turnpike could be like, so we're glad you made it.

I want to start off today on a bit of a somber note, but I think the topic that we're gonna discuss, as Artis mentioned, it has this natural tension built into it because while we're talking about the challenges that face black America as a result, the financial services industry, we know that there are also some positive things that come out of even the challenges that that we persist through.

As was mentioned in the introduction, I'm the immediate past president of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP and I couldn't start this session without holding space for Keenan Anderson who was killed by the Los Angeles police on January the third.

He was in a car accident and flagged the police down for help and was tased to death and died of cardiac arrest.

This just happened.

And so when we talked, Emily and I, in preparation for this, we talked about the pervasiveness of this white wall and the fact that while we are talking about its impact in financial services, as black Americans, we know it doesn't only exist in financial services and these are challenges and issues that we hold in almost every sector and every place that we have to navigate through life.

So if you all would just join me for a moment of silence for Keenan Anderson as community continues to deal with these issues, and then we're gonna get into a robust discussion.

Thank you all for that and I know our radio audience, I appreciate it as well.

So we talked about the fact that I have a bit of a background as a financial advisor formerly and when I read the book, I was going through my own like, reliving the experiences that happened, and you talked about Linda Friedman.

So those of you that have not had a chance to read the book yet, please get it.

It is a truthful story, but it almost feels like fiction.

You're reading it like something like, this can't be real, but it really is.

Linda Friedman was the attorney that has handled many of these class action lawsuits against some of the financial services industry organizations that you talk about in the book, and I had a chance to meet Linda and work with her.

I was party to a lawsuit against MetLife as one of the lead plaintiffs, and I wanna start with this antidote that Linda talked about in the trial.

It's really hard to get a class certified when you're talking about some of the issues that happen in financial services, and Linda gave the example to the federal judge that I thought was profound.

She said, "If I flip a quarter one time and it's heads, you wouldn't know that anything is wrong with the quarter.

If I flip that same quarter a hundred times and it's heads every single time, you say something is wrong with the quarter."

And the reason that she was using that analogy is, you talk about in the book, there are so many of these different isolated incidences that someone would say, "This is not discrimination.

This is not racism.

This is not a system."

But once you pull all the situations together, you're able to identify that there's a larger problem here.

And so when you think about the conversations that you had with Linda during this book and kind of just as a journalist, what are some of the anecdotes or some of the experiences or examples of issues that came up in the book as your result of your conversations with Linda?

- Well Danielle, let me start by saying you're absolutely right that there is a context in which all of these stories exist and a persistent problem with the effort to get justice for people who are experiencing this discrimination, starts with that context evaporating, every time an individual makes some kind of claim that they're being mistreated because of the color of their skin.

And as a journalist, I started out without that context and I started out listening to stories of people saying, "I am being mistreated because I'm black."

By responding to those stories with my typical skepticism, you know, we have to weigh both sides and what proof is there, and it was only after I heard many, many stories and also started to learn about the connective tissue between the stories that I was able to understand, as a journalist, that this context needed to be put in place at the beginning of every interaction that I was having.

And I tried to start the book with an example of a case that was really hard to understand without this context.

A man named John Lockette was accusing Morgan Stanley of firing him because he was black.

He was a manager.

He had been hired during a period under which Morgan Stanley was actually in an agreement, a settlement period with a class of black financial advisors and black employees at Morgan Stanley who had claimed that the bank had discriminated against them.

As part of the settlement agreement, they had to submit to an outside monitor for a period of time.

Lockette was hired during the monitorship and he had a great time and he advanced and he liked his bosses and his employees liked him.

And then the monitorship ended, the monitor went away, nobody was watching and things just started to go downhill.

He got reassigned.

All of a sudden, he was reporting to new people and they started giving him terrible performance reviews and they started to tell him things that were really vague, like, "Your employees are afraid of you."

And he would say, "Well, you know, like, can you give me an example?

Like, who's afraid of me and why?

And you know, even if you can't use names, tell me an example.

What did I do?"

Nobody could give him that.

And eventually it was just sort of like, there was nothing he could do to change.

They just performance reviewed him out and he sued them 'cause he had no doubt about what the real problem was.

But he was having a really difficult time convincing anyone that what he had experienced was real.

You know, Linda and I had just started talking.

I had actually heard about the case from somebody else.

And so, when it turned out that she was representing him, I was like, "Okay, well you know, I already know who Linda is."

And I talked to him and he was so tired.

He had been telling the same story over and over again.

And I felt like, you know, in retrospect when I think about the tone of his voice and I think about the way he answered questions, I feel like he was not gonna give up telling the story, but he was also resigned to the fact that I was treating these anecdotes that he was sharing with me the same way everybody else had treated them.

- Yeah.

- You know, another huge step for me though in the context was very depressingly, when I met somebody who had recorded his boss saying racist things, had saved every email, and could point to all of the gaslighting, could, you know, show me documents where the bank was claiming one thing and he could prove that that thing was wrong and that they were trying to cover up, you know, the fact that he had already complained about discrimination, that kind of thing.

And unfortunately, that was what it took for me as a white reporter to like, understand that there was a really big thing going on that was just not being acknowledged.

- You know, Emily, again, I think about the similarities and the parallels of having the evidence.

We think about like, dash cam footage when it exists, or body cam footage when it exists versus when it doesn't.

And one of the things that came up in the book that really, I would love to hear your thoughts on, as you think about the audience that's listening and the audience that's in here today is, what does it take to get people to believe us when we don't have the recording?

Because someone took courage to record and, you know, hopefully tried not to get caught while they were doing that.

But what does it take for us to get people to believe our situations like John and others who are really trying to get their bosses or HR departments or legal or outside journalists to just believe the stories that we're telling that are true?

- Well, that is an enormous metaphysical question that the answer lies in the drastic imbalance of power that exists in this country.

And so, I mean, if you ask me as a journalist, I will tell you, and you being anyone who's listening who feels like they're being mistreated, record everything.

You know, you use the documentation as a weapon.

You make sure that there's an indisputable record.

And we see that, as you mentioned, in instances of police brutality, lynchings, murders, George Floyd.

I mean, what would've happened to George Floyd's case?

- It wouldn't be a case.

- It wouldn't be a case.

And so, but why is it like that?

Because we have a drastic, as I said, imbalance of power that needs to change and every person who's listening and every person who's paying attention to this issue needs to be a part of that change by acknowledging that this power imbalance exists and doing what they can by, you know, listening to people and believing them and understanding the struggles that black Americans go through every day.

I mean, everyone has to do that work.

- Yeah, and I shared when we were talking how, when I was contacted by Linda's law firm about the settlement or the class action lawsuit against MetLife, I initially said, "No, I'm not gonna participate."

Because oftentimes as black Americans, we're accused of playing the race card, and it's like, here you go again.

So I knew what I had experienced, but I also attribute it to like, just a bad boss who wasn't a good person, you know, not that it was something that was systemic that was happening.

And as we had the conversation, I started to explain what's going on and before I could finish my sentence, Linda was finishing it for me and saying this.

I'm like, "Well, wait a minute.

You weren't there.

How do you know?"

She said, "'Cause Danielle, it's happening all across the country.

You're not the only advisor it's happening to and if you were a white female, this would not be happening to you."

And I got to the place where I had to acknowledge that because I have dealt with systemic racism for so long, it is normal to me.

The experiences that I was having were very normal for me, but they weren't acceptable and they weren't okay.

And so I wanna read an excerpt from the book.

The heading is "Facing the White Wall."

It's the introduction.

It says" The white wall is my attempt to face head-on, the issues financial industry executives have ignored.

The people whose stories I highlight have known for most of their lives that this is what the world was really like.

Although they too might be inclined to underestimate the size of the wealth gap, they will make no mistake in their assessments of the daily toils of being black in America and trying to go to a bank, to get a job in finance, or another realm of the corporate world, or access the seamless consumer experiences white people around them take for granted.

They have stared down enormous disappointments, repeated setbacks, endless frustrations, humiliations, slights, the memories of which keep them awake at night and make them feel exhausted and ill.

Yet, they have carried on with their lives."

So Emily, I wanna know in that statement how facing the white wall has changed you.

- I think that paragraph is reflective of the journey that I've been on, one in which I came to realize what was going on around me that I was not a part of in terms of, I was not a victim of any of these things.

I could go to the bank without a problem.

I didn't have to have, you know, like, three different kinds of ID every time I wanted to cash a check.

I didn't have to prepare to be rejected from a bank, you know, it's just all of these different things.

For me, my journey and my learning experience was just like, "Wow like, like this happens every day and as a white person, I did not know this and I did not have to experience it."

And it's like this invisible reality, but it shouldn't be invisible.

It's invisible because of this power structure that we have where the white experience is like, the baseline experience in this country, completely unjustly.

It shouldn't be like that, but that's how it is.

And we somehow are continuing to walk around in this fog where we're not paying attention to what's happening to people in this country who don't have the same privilege that white people have.

- Yeah.

And you did, I think, something very interesting in the book because you included experiences even from folks outside of financial services and one was Open Mic, the artist, jazz musician who kind of talks about the parallels of what's happening in the music industry.

Why was it so important to kind of include some of those narratives to really help tell this story?

- Danielle, as you pointed out at the beginning of our conversation, this is a problem that isn't contained to the financial industry.

It's everywhere.

The reason I included the two voices who had nothing to do with the financial industry was twofold.

I wanted to make that point.

I wanted to make sure that it was really clear that this, you know, injustice, imbalance of power, racism was everywhere.

But I also wanted to give readers an understanding of the fact that they might be, without even realizing it, sort of accepting themselves from being part of this whole structure.

And by talking to these two people who had nothing to do with the financial industry, sort of like on the surface, I wanted people to understand that A, nobody is completely disconnected from the financial industry.

It's part of all of our lives.

And B, nobody is disconnected from the dynamic that creates the racist dynamic that creates these injustices.

- Yeah.

And it's really hard sometimes for folks, like you said, that are not experiencing it, to just imagine that this is someone's reality.

I'm gonna pick on Dan 'cause he's supposed to wear white pants the next time that I saw him, I thought, based on the last forum we did together.

But Dan and I had this ongoing kinda like, Twitter thread about the home appraisal industry and it was mentioned in the opening remarks as well about the fact that you have families all across this country who are essentially getting low-balled when they're putting their homes up for sale or trying to refinance and have had to do drastic things, like take family photos and artwork and things like that down and have somebody else show up.

So I wanted to ask you a question about Bill Rogers, which was something that you mentioned in the book about what we could do around this issue of appraisals.

It was raised at a conference that you were at and Bill Rogers, who ends up becoming the CEO of Truist Bank which was the merger between SunTrust and, was it- - [Emily] BBNC.

- BBNC, BBNC.

So he says, "My little note of caution though is, let's not have unintended consequences with the appraisal process."

He said, "Because we don't want the standards to become too loose.

We saw the impact of that in 2006 and 2008 and those communities that we want most to help, they were the most negatively impacted by that."

Why was that a statement that was so important for you to include in the book?

- This was an amazing moment and actually, I need to give a shout out to the Cleveland Fed table.

Where are you guys?

Thank you, Cleveland Fed and Federal Reserve System, for the amazing Racism in the Economy series.

This was a moment that happened during the Racism and Housing panel, and Bill Rogers was there and the scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was there.

And so, this happened after a presentation of proposals for how to change home appraisals to make them less racist.

I'm sure everybody in this room knows how racist the home appraisal system is.

What Bill Rogers was saying is, "Okay, it's great.

Like, we should change the appraisal process but like, let's not go overboard and go too crazy giving people's homes higher values that have had lower values."

This is like this banker tick.

Bankers do it all the time.

It's like a lobbyist, it's like a talking point.

Like, "We can't have unintended consequences for changing stuff.

You know, we have to be really conservative."

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was like, "Excuse me, that's not what happened in the financial crisis."

And I loved this moment because this never happens.

Like the, you know, let's be aware of unintended consequences talking point just usually goes, it sails through completely like, unchecked.

But Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's point was that the black communities whose home values and whose lives were devastated in the financial crisis were targeted by banks who were trying to get them out of their 30 year fixed mortgages, fixed rate mortgages I should say, and into adjustable rate mortgages that eventually caused many people to default.

Because who could ever pay that no matter what the color of your skin is when your mortgage rate goes, you know, through the roof?

All of a sudden, exploding arms is what they were called.

Yeah, you're not gonna be able to pay that back.

And so, that was just a moment when it was like, the industry and all of that smooth sailing and all the assumptions that go unsaid just met reality and a kind of reality that is almost like, ships passing in the night very often.

And I felt like people who read that and thought about it might then apply it to other things that they hear.

- Yeah, and you talk about the fact that some people were concerned about this book, like is it anti-bank.

And we've got a lot of banks in the room and we thank you for being sponsors for today's forum, right?

But just the notion that there is a role that the financial services industry can play in fixing the problem and I wanna just call out the fact that Cynthia mentioned, we are right on the heels of MLK holiday.

And in July of 1967, there was a speech that Dr. King did in Charleston, South Carolina that many people believe he was speaking about reparations, and you talk about reparations in the book.

But one of the things he talks about is the fact that racial injustice is the black man's burden while it's the white man's shame.

But in 1865 when the slaves were freed, they didn't get land, they didn't receive anything.

I've had the distinct privilege of going to Israel twice last year, and I know you're Jewish as well and you talk about that in the introduction, you know, of the book.

We know that Germany is still paying reparations today to victims of the Holocaust and paid a massive amount of reparations to the state of Israel, which allowed them to buy materials for infrastructure and raw materials to really help establish and build the country.

You talk about in the book that the banks could absolutely do things like advocate for reparations for the black community.

I want you to elaborate on that assertion that there's a role for the broader community to play in trying to repair the harms that were caused to black Americans.

- Sure, so let me start out by saying that when I was writing the book, I was asked by the publisher, "You know, don't just like, list everything that's wrong.

Tell us how it can be made right."

And I really like, I am a student.

I'm still a student of this topic.

I'm not an expert.

You know, I haven't achieved authoritative status, but here's my journey.

I went from like, not really even paying attention to the reparations conversation to believing that that is the only way we are going to make real change.

- You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen.

(audience applauding) - And so I got to like, the broad concept of why we need reparations.

We need the truth and reconciliation that comes along with reparations.

I'm talking about the financial industry.

Everybody in the financial industry is concerned with money and bottom line and the velocity of money.

And guess what?

Like, there's a huge group of people who didn't get access to that and should.

But then my question in continuing to write was, well, what should that look like.

Should banks be going through their contributions to the economy and their profits from slavery and figuring out how much they have to pay into a big reparations pool?

So I relied on the scholars and economists who are already doing this work.

Sandy Darity is one of them and I relied heavily on his work, his research, his opinions, and I talked to him and he said, "Look, corporate America is not big enough to pay what is needed for reparations, but corporate America is very powerful.

If the big banks really think that there is injustice in this country and want to contribute to closing the racial wealth gap, they should support a government funded reparations program.

They should use their incredible lobbying power to openly advocate for reparations."

I think that's a great idea because in addition to the fact that banks get what they want a lot of times in Washington, I also think that having to explain publicly, why reparations are necessary, will help individual bankers be less racist.

It will help the people who, you know, start out at a call center and work their way up to teller positions that are customer facing and then become management.

- [Danielle] You're talking my life story.

- Yeah.

It will help those people understand this context that we've been talking about, which is so invisible to white people.

- Yeah, and you talked a lot about the fact that, you know, our economy is not a zero sum game.

And so, you have this whole segment of the community that is relegated to a second class status in terms of their ability to access capital and do things that other families do, like buy homes and start businesses.

And there's a lot of data and research that talks about how much our economy suffers from not having full participation of a whole segment of our community.

So I mean, there's a lot of support so it's this willingness, how do we change hearts and minds, you know, to get people to that point.

And I think we're in a place in our country right now, we're maybe looking towards going to a recession.

There are folks that think these things are not possible but I do believe, like you, that we could absolutely rely on our friends and partners in corporate America to lean in like they did in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd when everybody made pledges.

This is how you have opportunity to kind of, I think, put those pledges to work.

- Can I make one little note on that?

- Absolutely.

You're the author.

- I really hope they lean in way more than they did in 2020 when all they did was talk.

- Yes.

Drop the mic on that one.

(audience laughing) One other thing that you talked about was this group called Quad A, which is an organization that helps to bring black advisors together from all across the country to kind of really talk about what it's like being in the financial services industry.

And I said that in the beginning, that there's this kind of healthy tension between being in the industry and knowing the issues that are there while you're working in it, but also having this deep belief that you gotta have somebody in the system that helps to make it better and to do right by people.

What were some of the things that you learned from being in the room as we transition to audience Q and A?

- Well, I went to Quad A's annual conference in 2019.

One of the things that I learned was, how the financial services industry saw Quad A.

This is a really basic thing.

Everybody in here is probably gonna be familiar with the concept that when you have an event, like a big conference, you can get sponsorships, right?

And you have different levels like platinum, gold, silver.

Well, there were zero platinum sponsorships and I don't even think there were gold sponsorships.

All the big banks did silver and that's weird.

- [Danielle] Yeah.

Somebody wants to be the big one usually.

- Yeah.

No one like, stepped up.

And the other thing that I learned was, these big banks sent people to Quad A, they mostly talked about how great that they were and how much they loved diversity and all of their speech was really positive and it didn't have anything to do with what was really going on.

While Quad A was happening, the, you know, final machinations of a huge settlement with a class of black financial advisors at JP Morgan were being rolled out.

JP Morgan was there, they never mentioned it.

Of course.

Like it's in their minds.

Of course they didn't mention it.

And I also heard over and over from the participants of Quad A who were black financial advisors, a mindset that was like, "Okay, it's tough.

Here are tips and tricks for navigating the road."

I walked into a session that a pair of advisors who had just set up their own firm were having, it was called getting to a billion dollars, like how to get a billion dollars in client money under management.

And they were talking about, you know, what it's like to go out on your own after leaving a big financial services firm.

And one of them actually said like, "If you haven't had enough bad experiences at a big firm, you may not be here yet."

And that was such a telling statement.

- Yeah.

Thank you.

We're gonna turn it over to Artis again.

(audience applauding) - Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for the conversation, today.

We're about to begin the audience Q and A. I'm Artis Arnold, member of the City Club Board of Directors and Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Huntington National Bank.

We are joined today by Emily Flitter, journalist with the New York Times and author of "The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America."

Moderating the conversation is Danielle Sydnor, immediate past president and NAACP Cleveland branch and founder of CEO of We Win Strategies Group.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students and those joining via livestream at cityclub.org or radio broadcast at 89.7 IdeaStream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question for our speaker, please tweet it to @thecityclub.

You can also text at 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And a city club staff will try to work it into our program.

May we please have the first question?

Thank you.

- [Speaker] All right, sounds good.

Our first question is a text question.

"Of all the stories you gathered about banking while black, how many of them were resolved positively, and what were different in those stories versus those who ended very poorly?"

- That is a really excellent question.

And my book, the very ending of my book is a sort of selected denouement that describes a few outcomes of the stories that I told in the book.

I can't say that any of them really ended positively.

The most uplifting story ending is the story of Jacqueline Campbell, who was a financial advisor and a manager at big financial advisory firms and then she set out on her own to start her own firm that is now devoted specifically to collecting business from retiring financial advisors and passing it on to young black financial advisors because white financial advisors have been given books of business for the existence of the industry and black financial advisors at every firm have been shut out from doing that.

But other than that, the stories end with people not working at the places where they were working when they complained of discrimination, sometimes leaving the industry entirely, or they end incredibly depressingly by people realizing they can't speak up specifically to HR about discrimination and finding ways to cope with the mistreatment that continues, but privately and through a network of friends and trusted colleagues.

- Yes, I was just wondering in your research, if you found anything that might indicate if an immigrant or a refugee of color might have an even tougher time in the financial industry because people might be, say, worried about their status or use the excuse, I can't understand this person because of their accent, something like that.

- So I've heard all kinds of specific stories of discrimination, and I'm not picking on you, but I'd like to point out that I get this question almost every time I talk about the book and it's like, "Okay, we just heard about how bad racism is for black people in the financial services industry.

What about this other group?"

And I want to just acknowledge that there are all kinds of experiences out there and the bad experiences of one group don't cancel the bad experiences of another group.

But the reason that I'm focusing in this book, and that we're talking about this specifically, is because this problem is rooted in the foundations of our country so deeply and it has been so poorly addressed throughout the history of this country that we need to focus on it and we can't get distracted by really anything else.

However, I also think that anyone who has gone through a similar experience can find empathy in that experience and extend to understanding this concept.

I hope that that's an okay answer.

I'm not trying to like... (audience applauding) - Hello.

Thank you.

You've already started answering the question about how can big banks help close the ownership gap in small businesses.

Our family owns the only vertically integrated, medical cannabis company in the state of Ohio, and we're of the four percent population across the United States.

So when you flip a coin to determine who owns a medical cannabis company, 96 times, it's gonna be a white owner.

So my question is, are there conversations, are there Wall Street veterans, current Wall Street professionals that are working on a workaround for black business owners so that we can sustain our business, not just rely on revenue, but have infusion of capital so that we can sustain our businesses, grow our businesses, and stay in this industry?

Because if it's not, if someone's not doing a working round like right now, then that four percent is gonna go to three percent to two percent and then we're not gonna have a stake in this game.

As a black business owner, we are able to employ lots of people of color.

We have a very diversified workforce and we want that to be sustainable, so I'm hoping that someone is working on a workaround because it's illegal at the federal level so that we have access to capital, so that we can be sustainable.

- Okay just at the very end, I got better what you were talking about with the workaround because there is the one issue of, small businesses with black owners can't get capital with the same ease as white small business owners just like, across the board.

But you're specifically talking about the cannabis industry, which is, I'm happy to say that the federal government, there's a huge bipartisan effort to legalize banking cannabis businesses.

It's called the Safe Act and that is what I would point to, but that's just sort of like the top line thing.

There are all kinds of barriers that black owned businesses, no matter what industry they're in, have to getting capital.

And what I always say when people ask me, you know like, is there any safe place out there, is there any good place, there are also mission-driven organizations that have the specific orientation to lend to black-owned businesses.

We shouldn't need those, but we do need them.

And if you need a loan or if you need access to capital in some other way, you should look for CDFIs, minority depository institutions, places that will know the black experience and be able to guide you as a business owner through this.

The cannabis industry specifically, the issues that you just raised, actually if you can look me up on LinkedIn, there's a specific community of black owned cannabis business owners who are trying to make sure that black business owners in the cannabis space don't get shut out, don't get criminalized by the disconnect between the federal government and state government.

So like, there's somebody who keeps messaging me about it that I could put you in touch with.

- [Speaker 2] Okay, thank you and we also accept reparations.

Thank you.

(everyone laughing) - I haven't read your book so I apologize, but whenever I read about the racial wealth gap, one of the primary reasons I've read is that there is that disparity in home ownership rates between white Americans and black Americans and so many white Americans have equity.

My question is, though, I'm really troubled though if the solution is to get more people to be homeowners of any color because I think home ownership, and there's a mountain of evidence to support this, is really a poor way to invest your money.

There are other virtues to home ownership, but investment is not one of them.

So are there ways to eliminate this wealth gap without necessarily encouraging people to be homeowners, but to do it in some other way?

Thank you.

- Thanks for the question.

In my book, I talk about all the ways the financial services industry, actually, keeps the racial wealth gap wide by denying basic services to black Americans.

And home ownership, you know, whether you can get a home loan at a reasonable price or not is really just the tip of the iceberg of this denial or extra administrative burden to services.

So here's an example.

How do you preserve wealth when you have it?

You ensure your property, whether you have a home or a car.

If you're black and you have an insurance policy and you try to make a claim, you will have a harder time getting paid out.

So how do we close the racial wealth gap?

Insurers should stop being racist and that's one example of many of its kind that doesn't involve making a decision about what the right investment is.

It's not about like, "Oh, are people just not managing their money correctly?"

No, it's about the industry stopping being racist.

It has does nothing to do with investment decisions.

- I love the notion of like, just stopping being racist, but like, you know?

(everyone laughing) - [Emily] (laughs) Okay.

- You know.

- It's easy, right?

- You know, easier said than done.

I guess I wonder from a policy standpoint, like we have had such a hard time on a federal level really acknowledging whether or not black folks should get reparations.

We have to have studies on whether or not black folks should get reparations, excuse me.

And so my question really is like, how do we maintain, or like, who has the oversight, who has the teeth to ensure that the banking industry actually follows through if they were going to be committed to this endeavor?

And then to take it a step further, I just think about when you talk about just how the finance industry has profited off of black and brown bodies, particularly like we saw, when 1619 came out, one of the things that was talking about was how enslaved people had mortgages on their bodies, right?

And so like, financial industries, not just in this country, but all over the world profited off of us.

How do we ensure that that reach globally gets back to descendants of African and enslaved people in the United States?

- That's a huge question and I can only answer it, I mean, you know what, not being a policy maker, I can only sort of like, go back to my own role and say that journalism is really important.

We have to hold these big institutions accountable and we can't let them make public pronouncements and not check up on what they really mean.

And that goes for banks but it also, your question made me think of somebody who's actually in the book.

Her name is Deadria Farmer-Paellmann and she went to law school specifically to sue big companies, including big banks for reparations, and it was an amazing sort of turn of events in her life and she lost, but she kind of showed us like, what works and what doesn't work.

She's now involved in, well, she still is actively like, emailing and calling big banks and saying like, "You have not made this public and I found it in, you know, Rhode Island customs records from like, early 18 hundreds that, you know, Bank of America did this and that."

Predecessor bank, I should say.

But she's now also involved in an effort to get pieces of African art that were looted and brought to Europe and the United States back to Africa.

And so, you know, she is a one woman operation, but I think every listener today, every person in this room, we all need to be like Deadria, if not devoting our entire lives to doing these kinds of things then doing whatever we can and we need to pay attention to it and we need to not let, you know, sort of glossing over narratives happen and we just really need to keep people's feet to the fire.

- Good afternoon.

Great discussion.

Do you think that respectability politics sustains the imbalance of power?

- Can you define respectability politics?

- We straightened our hair in order to become politics, politicians, some of us to fit into places where the dominant workforce is white and that's where the power is.

We wear our hair a certain way, we change our words, we hide from our customs, we become imposters to fit in.

- I think that, yes, I'm not blaming anybody for doing that, but I'm blaming the people who impose those expectations, definitely.

And the way that I saw it when I was doing my research for my book is, bank tellers looking at what somebody's wearing, who walks into the bank and looking at their skin color and saying, whatever check they brought in here cannot be for them.

And that's how people get the cops called on them at banks because the teller is saying, "What does a person who deserves to have 10,000 dollars in a check look like?"

And it's not a, as I quote in the book, "Young African American male with blonde dreadlocks."

And that needs to change.

Like, there's nothing wrong with that person and that person should be able to look exactly how he wants to look and everybody else who's making judgments based on him needs to stop.

- [Speaker 3] Thank you.

- Good afternoon.

I appreciate your commentary thus far.

My concern is a little more earthy, if you will.

I'm considering all the announcements out here on the radio, buy a car with 99 cents down, get a dollar for 200 dollars in bets.

We have all these different things targeting our community and they're all supported by the financial service industry.

And we have a lot of things that are going on and I'm curious to know if you have some information regarding what is being done to identify and fight the subsidiaries that support consumer retail, high interest rates and usually practices and purchasing, as well as the insurance industry which is augmented by a government policy to force people to buy insurance policies to drive and have home ownership.

- Another gigantic question.

So like, these scammy financial offers are bad and state regulators and the consumer financial protection bureau in Washington are the keepers of, you know, the power to stop these bad like, usurious products from being sold and it's really up to them.

And again like, you know, we need to make sure that our government institutions have the resources and the power that they need to have to enforce the laws that are on the books and if the laws aren't good enough, then we should change them and make them really good.

I mean, the insurance industry, like I said, regulation is a huge part of that.

The insurance industry is regulated by states.

They have 50 different regulators.

No one is powerful enough to actually even investigate really, really, really, really obvious huge claims of racial discrimination and like, that needs to change or the insurance industry will just get to continue doing what it's doing.

- [Speaker 4] Yeah.

- As a New York Times reporter working on a book, I suspect that you opened up a lot of doors to high level offices in the financial services industries, at least until the name of your book became public.

But can you give us any good stories?

Did you talk to any CEOs that were convincing or were particularly unconvincing?

Can you give us any color?

(audience laughing) Did you talk to Goldman Sachs?

(everyone laughing) - Well, first of all, I've been writing on and off about the banking industry since 2008 and I'm not important enough for like, all of the big CEOs to know who I am, but somebody in their organizations does, and I don't think that this book surprised anybody.

So like, I actually have not been shut out of doing my job.

I still do my job and I have, you know, spoken at various times with the big CEOs, all of them, and it's really tough because CEOs, the best thing that they do is speak perfectly and say that their organization is committed to this and that.

You know, they also are so removed from so many different parts of what's really happening on the ground that all they can do is make statements like that.

So, I don't really know how to answer your question because in the course of my job, yes, I talked to these people, but I have nothing to relate that I didn't put in the book that was meaningful that they shared with me.

- Well, thank you for your time and I didn't have the opportunity to read your book, but I think you commented on something earlier and if you can elaborate it in regards to my question, you had indicated, you know, that black financial advisors have the challenge to acquire books of business.

As a black financial advisor, can you elaborate a little bit more, if you discussed in your book, the nepotism in the industry and how that may cause lack of diversity?

- That, you know, it's a huge part of the industry.

Like, you have a financial advisor, his kid goes to college, graduates from college and starts working as his assistant and then, you know, gets all of his licenses and then takes over the family business and the same clients who had the dad managing their finances now have the son and that's sort of like a tradition and beyond that, when you have a rich kid who goes to college who's white, oftentimes, who gets outta college, gets a job at one of these big wirehouse advisory firms, the firms know that this 22 year old kid has like a lot of, you know, rich friends and parents with rich friends.

That is like, a fundamental part of the financial advisory industry.

The problem is, the people who are running these big wirehouses are just saying, "Well, because this element exists, we're just gonna pigeonhole every black financial advisor who comes in the door and assume that they don't have any of these connections, not help them make the connections and not do the normal positioning that the privileged white kids get when they come in the door."

And so, it just becomes like the snowballing problem.

- Our final question's also a text question.

"How do credit scores play a role in discrimination?

What can be added or removed from credit score calculations to further equity?"

- So, I have a chapter about AI in my book and there's a lot of work being done on credit scores right now, and I wanna acknowledge that that work is being done and that I can't tell you every single detail about what the latest developments are in it because it's a complex effort and I'm happy that it's happening.

But the way the credit decisions have worked for the past, you know, 30, 50 years has compounded the exclusionary elements of the financial system and credit scores perpetuate that as they are now.

It's like if you need to get credit to have credit, you need to get credit to fix the credit score.

If you're black, you know, your neighborhood is taken into account, utility bills don't count towards your credit score and all kinds of just massive amounts of unfairness are built into the calculation of that score.

So yes, credit scores absolutely play a part.

We need to fix them.

There is work being done, but that's just kind of like, one element of how credit decisions are made that is totally unfair.

We have many elements to fix.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, Emily and Danielle, for joining us at the City Club today.

This is truly a powerful conversation that needs to be built upon and I hope that you're able to do so.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Authors and Conversation series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the John P. Murphy Foundation, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

The City Club is grateful for our continued support.

We would also like to welcome guests at tables hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, Huntington, the Metro Health Foundation, and Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

Thank you all for being here today.

Next week, on Thursday, January 19th, we will be back online with a virtual forum joined by Rick Hess and Pedro Noguera.

They will discuss their latest book, "A Search for Common Ground: Conversations about the Toughest Questions in K through 12 Education."

Then on Friday, January 20th, we will be joined once again by Steve Phillips, the author of "How We Win the Civil War" and founder of Democracy in Color.

You can learn more about these forums and others at cityclub.org, and that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you again, Emily and Danielle.

We appreciate your time so much.

And thank you, members, friends in the City Club.

I'm Artis Arnold and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) - [Narrator 2] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(bright jingle) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on IdeaStream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.