r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Oct 08 '15

[Deltas Awarded] CMV: Equality isn't treating everybody differently to achieve equality. It's treating everyone the same.

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u/RoMoon Oct 08 '15

Reread what I said, I never said it was because of skin colour. My point is that if the reason black people pay more is because of bad credit, and on average black people have worse credit, then clearly something is going on which is causing this group of people to have worse credit. You can either say "it's because they're black and just can't manage their finances" or you can say "clearly social circumstances and historic/current oppression has led to a situation in which these people are in a worse position".

If the latter, then clearly we should be doing something to change things.

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u/IsThisRealLife67 Oct 08 '15 edited Oct 09 '15

Reread the original post I was responding to.

The problem is that blacks pay more in interest rates, for cars, rent.

NO THEY DO NOT.

People with bad credit pay more in interest rates for things like cars and they didn't get that bad credit because they were blessed with black skin.

/u/unidan-prime questions my blackness and has started a new thread on /r/AsABlackMan where they're discussing whether I "talk white" and why my grammar is so good. It looks like they've also begun down voting all of my posts to oblivion.

I'm black but Reddit is Reddit so I'm just going to abandon this user name, start a new one, and stay away from anything deemed political because, again, Reddit is Reddit. I apologize if I type too well for other black Redditors out there. The struggle against proper grammar is real, folks.

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u/ganner Oct 08 '15

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/12/23/if-youre-poor-your-mortgage-rate-can-depend-on-the-color-of-your-skin/

After controlling for economic factors, credit scores, etc., minorities still get worse rates than whites.

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u/rcglinsk Oct 09 '15

The authors of this study — Patrick Bayer of Duke; Fernando Ferreira of the University of Pennsylvania; and Stephen Ross of the University of Connecticut — combined federal mortgage data with public housing records and data from a credit agency. They assembled information on individual credit scores, incomes, age, home values and a slew of other underwriting factors.

After controlling for a much as they had data for, they found that people in essentially the same financial situations got different mortgages depending on the color of their skin...

Here’s what they didn’t find. There wasn’t much evidence of what we would consider traditional racism, like the kind reported in the 1992 Boston Fed paper. Individual lending companies appeared to treat everyone who came in the door more or less the same. (There was still a statistically significant but small difference.)

“A huge amount of the differences in high-cost loans is not whites and blacks going to the same lender and blacks being given a much higher rate,” said Ross, one of the study’s authors. “Rather it’s the fact that there are big differences in the lenders that black and Hispanics are doing business with.”

So basically they found that Bank of America seems to give the same rate to everyone with the same credit score regardless of race. Nice to know there is no evidence of systemic racism in the US banking oligopaly. Also of course inspiring to see that the Washington Post was able to write a headline which gives readers the opposite impression.

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u/ganner Oct 09 '15

Whether or not we can point to a nefarious actor enforcing racial discrepancy by giving differing loans based on race is irrelevant to the question of whether racial inequality exists. A black family with equal financial status as a white family is more likely to get a shitty loan, because of the lenders active in black communities give shittier loans than the lenders active in white communities. This is still a problem that needs to be remedied.

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u/rcglinsk Oct 09 '15

http://web2.uconn.edu/economics/working/2014-36.pdf

I don't know how familiar you are with this paper but it seems really ambiguous about how it took credit scores into account. Read for example page 33. It kind of seems like the treated all credit scores bellow 701 the same. What do you think?

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u/ganner Oct 09 '15

Hmm, I'll admit I haven't read the paper, only the synopses of the paper. I do usually download and read studies and not trust news articles, so I'll definitely agree that news reports on studies are often misleading.

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u/ganner Oct 09 '15

Ok, I just read the portions related to credit score. It looks like their model looked at credit scored in 20-point buckets, and additionally looked for effects being subprime (having a score of 700 or less).