Terri Friedline: Why Financial Technology Won’t Save a Broken System

so [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to real world perspectives on poverty solutions i'm trevor bechtel facilitator of this series with poverty solutions at the university of michigan an instructor of the course that accompanies this lecture series over the next four weeks we will introduce key issues regarding the causes and consequences of poverty in this virtual space featuring experts in policy and practice from across the nation we are an audience of students enrolled in a course community members academics policy makers and interested people from southeast michigan and beyond and we are really excited about today's presentation from terry freedline presented in partnership with the center on finance law and policy before we dig into this conversation i want to remind our viewers that we want to hear from you you can submit questions and comments in the comment box to the right on youtube or on twitter using the hashtag um povertysolutions we look forward to a meaningful conversation and we will try to get to as many of your questions as possible we welcome an open and respectful dialogue and we want to let folks know that we will be responsive to any inappropriate content i invite you to check out our resources tune in for additional events and find other ways to connect with our poverty research at our website poverty.umich.edu terry friedline is associate professor of social work and faculty director at the center on assets education and inclusion at the university of michigan she is a faculty affiliate at five other university centers focused on financial system reform and racial disparities and she is the author of mapping financial opportunity at new america and the author of the book that we are going to talk about today banking on a revolution with oxford university press terry is a faculty expert with us at poverty solution and through that work brought us into partnership with bank black usa we've been augmenting their capacity with teams of students over the past two years and it's some of the most rewarding work that i've done and so i want to thank you terry for that i also count you as a friend and i'm continually impressed by the scope and depth of your knowledge and your passion for justice and inclusion but also the calm and patient way that you engage others and put yourself forward willing to contribute at every level so i'd like to welcome you to this lecture series and we're really looking forward to your presentation well thank you so much trevor i mean it's really an honor to be a part of the speaker series um it's a pleasure to be in conversation with you um and this is really a tremendous set um of speakers across the semester for the series and so those joining today i hope you're also able to check out the other presenters as part of this spear the series um who are really doing some tremendous work uh i feel fortunate to be able to talk with you today about technology financial technology in particular the expansion of a surveillance state and the implications for racial and and climate justice in the context of banking and finance as trevor mentioned this talk is based on my book um which was released last year and so i'm going to begin and kind of flow through my talk and kind of a similar ordering um of the book which begins with kind of an origin story about banks because our financial system like the united states is is rooted in histories of white racial violence and one of the earliest periods of this violence is genocide of indigenous peoples laylee long soldier has a poem that's titled 38 and it tells the story of the hood of 38. the dakota 38 were 38 men who were mass executed by hanging under the orders of of president lincoln in 1862 um and they were executed in retaliation for what's known as the sioux uprising um soldier's poem tells this tells this history so after the dakotas people's land were stolen white settlers were moving west they were forcing indigenous peoples off of their off of their lands in their territory um and and so as people were being forced away from their food sources they were starving there was a white trader named andrew merrick who had a trading post provided you know food and other services but he refused to lend that lend credit extend credit to the to the dakota for purchasing food and has this this saying that he's well known for um that if they are hungry let them eat grass well of course people who are starved cannot live the dakota peoples fought back white settlers and traders were killed including merrick and so in response to this uprising lincoln ordered this mass execution which happened just after the christian holiday of christmas on december 26th in 1862 and it is notable that a few days later this is when lincoln also signed the emancipation proclamation declaring that enslaved people should be freed and so another period of this violence was slavery and and banks were established during slavery um to finance this economic system this this economic system of capitalism racial capitalism is our economic system that that stratifies economic value kind of based on socially constructed hierarchies who is worthy of responsible banking it's fundamentally an economic system that concentrates power and there is much more there's much greater depth and theoretical work on racial capitalism so this is a brief explainer but um a great bit of work from black political thought has you know really expanded developed and expanded our understandings of what racial capitalism is but this is kind of the backdrop um to our conversation um because uh early banks white-owned banks um in teamwork with white slaveholders collateralize the bodies of black peoples who are enslaved onto the credit on to the ledgers of the financial system which was a precise way that that white people accumulated wealth and economic power during the period the very long period of slavery so so white slave holders detailed records they surveilled the black peoples that they had enslaved and then then used that in the financial system as capital and so one of the earliest banks in the united states was the bank of north america um it was proposed by a white slave trader named robert morris and established in 1781 in philadelphia and this was occurring at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade morris wanted the bank to expand the country's military power and repay revolutionary war debts and so early banks literally underwrote slavery and they financed militarization their two uh quotes that i often think of in thinking of this history um one is by angela glover blackwell a founder in residence at policy link who writes that banks are the underwriters of american racism and um alexander goodwin of the action center on race in the economy who writes that police are the muscle of capitalism and so morris specifically envisioned the bank of north america for these purposes now i mentioned that this was an origin story um and the bank of north america is known today as wells fargo so um i want to recognize one that there is a um you know there's a current campaign calling for the dismantling of wells fargo in particular but also that many of our banks and insurance companies have similar histories and some of their origin stories um being stood up and established during the period of slavery and so these are histories of of white supremacy and racism and specifically anti-black racism that are you know grounded rooted you know very well stitched into the financial system from their very origins banks are part of the institutions that are the gears that make our financial system turn and so these are gears that have financed redlining and segregation they've relied on credit scoring which advantages you know advantages whiteness and values at a higher economic rate white borrowers to a mass wealth by receiving better interest rates loans while disadvantaging black and brown borrowers with with lower credit scores um and banks kind of set the terms that they so that they win either way so even in the presence you know even when someone qualifies for a better loan um banks and lenders still you know in a racialized way determine who's worthy of responsible banking in a way the disadvantage is black and brown borrowers and advantages whites um and so one kind of example of this is is the racial wealth gap between the gaps between white and black and brown are here latino or latin a households in the united states the median wealth of white households is is 41 times that of the median wealth of black households and so these divides are widening they're not getting smaller they're widening in part because our financial system its institutions and the policy ecosystems around them are really designed to prioritize and to monetarily value whiteness and so part of what i argue in the book um and and why i want to begin with this history is that fintech is another iteration um fintech being this combination of technology and finance that um will not save kind of the existing brokenness the existing system that is that is rather broken um so fintech is this broad set of technologies um that supports and enables banking and financial services and it really includes a range of things um online and mobile banking um to payment systems to cryptocurrency and the use of artificial intelligence and it operates on individual and institutional levels so what i mean by that is you know fintech can be people-facing such as someone using a mobile banking app or you know a payment app to transfer money to peers or to pay for something at the store there's also fintech that is like institution facing or institution focused like hedge funds using investment algorithms and and so there are these people facing kind of fintech services or products and institutional ones and and i want us to think about like blurring those lines a bit and and seeing how they operate um and uh in support of one another um because i think enthusiasm for fintech which often is great um you know a high level of enthusiasm really lacks a critical analysis of how power is constant concentrated that is disconnected um from the historical understandings of anti-blackness that's that's stitched into the fabric of the financial system and and this i think vastly underestimates the the potential for fintech to exacerbate harms harms that will you know affect everyone um but that will be disproportionately paid for by black and brown peoples uh within our within our economy and so i began the book because um in so many spaces where i was working um which were predominantly white policy spaces there wasn't any critical analysis of fintech there was a great bit of enthusiasm but you know no one or very few people being willing to put on the breaks or consider you know some of the potential downsides of fintech so there was no concern for example about people who didn't have internet access which was believed to be a small and important group of people or nor were they considering information about data extraction about the concentration of wealth and corporate power or hyper surveillance of racially marginalized groups and so i i want to elevate some of these critical analyses of fintech especially in spaces where they're absent and this is because fintech is often marketed as a way to promote financial inclusion um kind of from a benevolent um and and good way to serve marginalized groups and it's often not just marketed as another way or another option but specifically to advertise it's it's benevolence stuart levy who's the ceo of facebook's dm project uh which which is a project is ongoing um said the company was developing their cryptocurrency to promote financial inclusion uh you know specifically talking about expanding access to those who need it most and so facebook is the same company that is you know criticized for being a monopoly for violating antitrust laws for selling users data incapable of removing hate speech from its platforms um for discriminating in its online advertising and also for for beginning to use its messaging system as a debt collection service which which is kind of a new iteration of the of the development of that of that platform and so by moving kind of full throttle toward fintech for financial inclusion for for expanding access to financial services i think we can abandon responsibility for what are you know really deeply rooted social problems you know inadvertently and abandon this responsibility and and turn them over to technologies that really are mostly being developed in white wealthy spaces and by white engineers that might not be thinking at all about racial justice or equity or or anti-racism and and just might be thinking about a very narrow part very people-facing part of the financial system rather than its connections to the whole so so one point of critique is that with regard to high-speed internet access this is really a prerequisite for using any type of fintech um we know this a little bit better now at this point in the pandemic but not everyone has high speed internet access um even smartphones have to be connected to the internet and and you can lose your connection to your money when your phone breaks or you need a software update or you use up all of your monthly data um bank branch banks are closing their branches around the country and this really raises the stakes on internet and smartphones as people have fewer like physical access points for banking and there's no way that that fintech can solve financial inclusion when people who are exploited by banks and lenders also do not have internet access so these data are a few years old but they haven't changed very much in that time frame in the average zip code across the united states only about 50 percent of homes had have had high speed internet access which means just from that standpoint it will be difficult to really address some of the exclusion problems in terms of who has access to banking if you know those same books also might not have access to internet um but you know part of my investigation into this work is that there are a number of scholars who have been concerned about technologies for a long time um so as i was trying to understand that the corporate capitalist business practices that we have come to shorthand as the digital divides i learned about research around data extraction and discriminatory algorithms and hyper surveillance from the works of folks like ruja benjamin and chris gilliard twana petty sophia noble tamara knopper and really an excellent group of scholars who are studying how new technologies surveil racially marginalized groups who are already targets of surveillance in multiple contexts like policing and housing and education so some of this surveillance should ring similar to the history of of white surveillance and slavery chris jilliard has used the term digital redlining to kind of describe some of these practices that are happening in educational contexts how how students are being surveilled and in education in university settings and the washington post did a really great profile on dr jilliard a few weeks ago and this is the center image and the slide which is why i want to point it to you now there's also work by tracy mcmillan cotton and others on platform capitalism and how you know black women use sophisticated used technologies and sophisticated ways to kind of navigate um institutionalized oppressions that might be experienced such as by going in person to a bank branch um but you know from this i've learned that like not only are we confronted with digital divides and disparate internet access but but fintech is also enabling kind of new digital forms of redlining and expanding surveillance that will be used in more punishing ways toward racially marginalized groups so an example of this is a few years ago bank of america was asking some customers you know about their citizenship status when they came in to do banking and and in those conversations with bankers that's information that gets put into the financial system and to someone's you know financial record that stays and gets tracked over time and i mentioned wanting to like blur the lines between people-facing and institutional facing fintech and that's what i'm going to do in an example that kind of illustrates both the limitations and i think some of the contradictions of fintech and so this example is of the nexus of climate change and wall street investors who are buying up properties and becoming landlords and so in my book this is the chapter called corporate landlords in the climate crisis which seems particularly relevant given all that is happening around us related to climate and i'm going to talk about lumberton north carolina and so from michigan you know we're going to move a little bit southeast and in lumberton north carolina there are twice as many payday lenders as there are bank branches banks are closing their branches in this area of the country broadband internet access is also pretty low about 20 percent of households in this area in robeson county which surrounds lumberton have access to to broadband internet and i want to talk about lumberton because um the city of lumberton was desert devastated by hurricanes um two separate hurricanes one in 2016 and one in 2018 um matthew and florence and both of these hurricanes brought near record amounts of flooding each time or record amounts of flooding um and you know much of our our housing development our floodplains our insurance policies you know these have all been developed based on weather disasters you know in the past but increasingly regions around the country like lumberton are experiencing 500 year and 1000 year weather events every few years so our models which include um you know insurance companies and and connections to the financial system these are not organized for the for the future that climate change is bringing so in 2016 hurricane matthew brought significant flooding and there was a technical port technical report that was issued after this hurricane hit that recommended that the town build floodgates to close a gap that exposed lumberton to the river there was there was a railroad underpass um and and the town was exposed to the river through this underpass and the report estimated that about 80 percent of this flooding would have been reduced or eliminated altogether if there had been floodgates but csx owned the railroad tracks that ran beneath the underpass and the company refused to allow anyone to build the floodgates and and to begin you know preventing for what could be a future hurricane or future you know flooding and weather disaster and so this is where i want to tell you that 37 of lumberton's residents are black 13 are native 10 percent are latino the remainder about 30 39 are white 36 percent of the town's residents have incomes that are below the poverty line um so i want to note that there was a very there was there was a very specific kind of corporate decision um that uh that was made in the context of a city that experienced dramatic flooding that was also disproportionately black and brown that therefore wasn't able to prevent or or wouldn't be able to prevent any future flooding so in 2018 hurricane florence was approaching the floodgates still hadn't been built the town wanted to build sandbag walls though so at first csx like repeatedly denied requests to build sandbag walls the company threatened lawsuits for anyone who has found trespassing on the tracks emergency petitions to the state's governor finally were successful and through executive order they allowed a sandbag wall to be built but but this approval came you know just when the hurricane was a few hours away so lumberton was again flooded this time by hurricane florence and you can see in this image um the highway and the underpass um and and the flooding that ensued um two years after you know the town was still recovering from the devastating hurricane in 2016. and so we know that our built environment isn't random um people across racial groups don't have equal ac equal chances of experiencing you know devastation from extreme weather banks that have financed redlining and segregation um they and continue ongoing kind of discriminatory lending and real estate practices these things enable lighter and wealthier populations to buy greater distance between themselves and extreme weather and even in fact communities that have experienced extreme weather and have received fema aid from the federal government white people gain wealth um in the midst of disaster um while while black and brown peoples see their see their average wealth or their net worth decline and so even in disaster you know white people are able to profit financially from you know from that experience in lumberton in particular black and brown residents were displaced from their homes at a rate that was three to six times that of white residents and the um the second hurricane remember there was already a first hurricane which had an impact on housing and the second hurricane shrunk the housing market in lumberton the rental market in particular by about 25 percent and so as climate change accelerates um there are wall street investors like banks like hedge funds private equity firms and university endowments have been buying up properties that were foreclosed you know sometimes foreclosed um from the great recession about a decade ago they've been buying up these properties that have been developed damaged or devalued so kind of buying on the cheap um and then you know turning around and renting those properties for profit and i'm mostly focusing on the united states here but this is really a global concern and so there's a floor of florida-based company called timeout communities and timeout communities was buying up properties in lumberton after the first hurricane so the first hurricane came properties were damaged people were displaced and in timeout communities began buying up some of those properties they began opening mobile home parks or purchasing mobile home parks and then renting out these properties to residents that had been displaced timeout communities owns about 19 mobile home parks in the lumberton area and so residents were displaced disproportionately black and brown residents some have been displaced at this point by multiple hurricanes and sought housing then and what became available from timeout communities that really replaced the town's affordable housing stock so they had access to the mobile home park zone by timeout communities but then the corporate landlord started raising rents and some residents saw their monthly payments triple and they saw their monthly payments triple from one month to the next so not without much notice residents who complained received eviction notices and then timeout communities began evicting people that had been displaced by multiple weather disasters and so as a renter to whom do you appeal for justice when your landlord is a private equity firm or a hedge fund and and what if anything can fintech kind of offer this dynamic well from the institution the institutional level kind of focus of fintech private equity firms and hedge funds are increasingly using fintech institution facing fintech like investment algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify profitable investment opportunities including foreclosed homes and apartment complexes and other kind of depressed markets so they are using this technology to scoop up additional properties and so while private equity is using fintech on the one side to concentrate wealth and power sometimes our responses um you know focus at the individual level so we might offer things to lumberton residents like a financial education class or a small emergency loan for an app that is going to manage income flows and help people track their expenses as stuart levy suggested you know facebook is going to create its dm digital currency even while at the same time you know some of these technologies and these processes are are really criticized for their potentially harmful environmental impacts so um bitcoin kind of extending the um extending the recommendations of of stuart levy and the dm project thinking about digital currencies and cryptocurrencies in particular the mining of bitcoin which has only been around for about 10 years already uses 20 percent of the electricity consumption of the entire global financial system and this is just bitcoin this is not cryptocurrencies as a whole um and so lumberton is i think a microcosm of what's happening around the country and what's happening around the world we're already seeing reports that wall street investors are are poised to profit from our current crisis um our crises that have occurred during the pandemic um there where mass evictions and foreclosures are still expected as zillow enters into the housing market in terms of buying up properties and so as a result of a climate induced global pandemic and and then kind of limited government response people can't pay their mortgages banks and lenders will foreclose on homes um private equity can buy up these properties in bulk and then create the conditions that institutionalize housing precarity you know on on a really massive scale fintech does not change these dynamics um and in fact i would argue that institutional facing fintech like amplifies them it does not shift power to marginalized groups to be able to you know confront or challenge or change these dynamics and so i think when we individualize fintech which is often in in conversations about solutions solutions to poverty which financial education is is often lifted up as one of those solutions when we individualize fintech to mobile banking or to managing income flows i think we overlook how fintech is is really helping to concentrate power in some of these other contexts um and it may even be directly contributing to you know really severe environmental harms um and so i think um when we sanction fintech for mobile banking i we can also give implicit permission i think for all the rest um and our language even even the common definition of fintech is defined as this whole set of technologies that kind of lumps all of the dynamics together and then perhaps propers up you know a benefit to a consumer which is an individual kind of consumption choice um and i think this is the sleight of hand um how promises for financial inclusion um are kind of proffered up as this facade while the rest of the financial system you know uses fintech to stack the deck in its favor um and i realized that some of this probably sounds pretty dire at this point but i do think that there is a good bit of hope that our financial system can be different and there are people and groups you know all around the country and all around the world taking steps to shift power and so public banking public banking movements are one of those movements that i write about in the book um native and indigenous communities have for a pretty long time called for divesting from environmentally harmful development projects the dakota access pipeline is is one example but i also want to note that there are protests or protests today at the u.s capitol

regarding the enbridge line 3 which would bring a new oil pipeline through treaty territory from canada to wisconsin and and banks finance finance some of these pipelines and environmentally harmful products but public banking movements are working together to remove private shareholder profit so the the ability you know for white wealthy and better but white wealthy investors to really profit from investments in different ways um like properties and like the buying up of rental properties uh and so they're working to remove a linchpin that concentrates power which i think is is really notable so there are cities and states around the country about 34 with active public banking coalitions some with pending legislation they have been successful especially in the state of california and in the city of los angeles which has passed legislation um that would that would create that allows for the creation of public banks so so these are real steps that are moving forward um and public banking would allow for about you know seven trillion dollars in public money money from pension funds money from tax revenues to be invested locally so instead of having that money invested in a wells fargo and having those profits and and interest kind of pulled out of communities that that money could stay locally and be in and be used to invest in things like affordable housing or new kind of green and sustainable development and to invest in the people that live there this is not a panacea public banking isn't isn't the panacea for everything but i think it is an important step and it is a step that works explicitly to shift power and so so part of the hope that i have is that movements like these are demonstrating that our institutions aren't intractable they aren't inevitable um they can be built with more transparency they can be built with more public accountability then private banks or proprietary algorithms that fintech is based on technology is often positioned as as this futurist thing but i don't think it inherently is so just because we see it depicted in in sci-fi sometimes or in our own imaginations of the future i think it can exist in the future but but people collectively we should get to decide kind of what that technology is how it exists the purposes that it serves and you know the benefits to the public good and and we can decide that in ways that advance racial justice and equity and those decisions don't have to be driven by by banks and by corporations and so that's kind of the message that i want to end on um as we kind of move here in a minute to questions and conversation um that there are efforts to shift power um and that people led movements with anti-racism with justice kind of at their core they can help us imagine that our financial and economic systems can you know can truly be different so i'm going to stop my sharing here and look forward to your conversations thanks so much terry that was just a wonderful presentation drawing um from so many areas uh in a kind of really consistent um coherent kind of approach so um there's a lot a lot for us to kind of pick up coming out of that um i wonder if we can start i know that there's a bunch of stuff about student loan debt in your book and we um we are kind of at a university with with a bunch of students um so i'm wondering if you can start by just kind of talking a bit more about the um kind of transparency and surveillance that kind of goes alongside student loan debt if that's another kind of facet here yeah sure um and thank you for thank you for pointing to that work in the book um part of what i write about is that you know there's a process that financial technologies use called securitization um so so one i'll say that you know we as a society have have pulled back from investing in in higher education as a public good right states invest less money the burden of education is shifted onto individuals and students in the form of debt so student loan debt you know is really increasing as a share of of all other kinds of debt securitization is this process that bundles up a whole bunch of individual lines of credit so like perhaps each of our credit cards or each of our student loan debt bills those get packaged together the banks can then sell off to other investors so other people end up buying that debt and they buy it in this bundle or this package and and student loan debt has something that has been historically pretty hard to have discharged in kind of bankruptcy hearings the government's especially student loans that are government-backed and the government guarantees um you know all uh all um you know all of that money will be paid so if somebody defaults you know the government pretty much guarantees that an investor is going to get that profit and so i don't know if this is what you're thinking in terms of student loan debt but um but i mean that creates the condition um you know especially a student loan debt is racialized and which means that black and indigenous than latino students in particular pay have more student loan debt pay on that student loan debt for a longer amount of time all of that gets bundled up into this process of securitization which means that that is that is helping to um funnel you know someone else's debt you know transmute that um into wealth for somebody else um and so not only do we have a kind of a problem of student loan debt but we have a problem of this process that that turns that debt into into profit and um and fintech is a tool to help make that securitization possible thanks thanks for that um yeah it's it's it's such a large um such a large system that you're identifying here um so deep in history but also kind of so deep in terms of kind of the new technologies that we dispose and it seems to like the way you detail it working its way out in all of these different areas it's just it's just fascinating um i'm going to go to a question from jeff cutler now do you see any movement towards your point of view in washington um so the house financial services committee has held some critical hearings on fintech and inclusion recently so do you do you see we we have a lot of kind of changes in our kind of federal political scene right now do you do you see these changes being positive yeah thank you and and thanks for that question jeff um i i think so so um there have been folks that have that have spoken at those committee hearings that have more critical views of fintech and that are calling for the consumer financial protection bureau for example um to have uh to have more oversight of what's happening in the fintech space not just creating a sandbox for innovation um but being really thoughtful about um what data are being collected and how and who has control over that so um although i have to say i've been talking about um at least internet and and banking since 2008 and it feels like that conversation has been really slow um you know it seems like it has just now kind of bubbled to the surface um so i see more momentum kind of moving forward with with folks taking a a critical view of that when you talk about um public banks and and that kind of shift um and and the kind of hope that that can kind of be a way for people to kind of take control of these systems um are you i'm so this is partly a question of clarification lydia thornberg has a question about what role you see small local banks playing in in this financial revolution so i'm interested in a bit in these kind of questions of scale um and there's a kind of follow-on um about the role of um black banks or black finance black fintechs um kind of helping in that in that context yeah um i i i want to try and be thoughtful about not saying that every effort is bad right um because i uh i think i probably lean that way and also know that that's not exactly true so so small banks community banks and black owned banks and other minority depository institutions do much better in terms of in terms of lending lending to folks at lower kind of credit score points lending to black and brown borrowers at higher rates compared to their larger bank counterparts so so smaller organizations that are really mission driven like do better on the whole they're also challenged and that they're still working within this larger system which means that you know they need to do things for themselves to survive and exist so one thing like um you know moving a pension fund or moving like tax revenue from a city a very large pot of money into these small institutions can be sustaining to help you know help them lend out in you know in easier ways instead of having a whole bunch of really small accounts um that still have the same sort of overhead um so i see that as a place that um smaller community banks black on banks really play a role in in serving communities where other banks um you know wouldn't invest i there's still kind of a contradiction though because a few years ago my colleague jacob faber and i worked on research where we interviewed banks and they were mostly small community banks and found that you know overdraft fees um the cost of a checking account that those uh you know those costs um we're also kind of um disparate across racial groups so white people paid significantly less for the cost of banking even at small community banks so um i think they're simultaneously like opportunities and tensions there you talk a lot about um that in the kind of ways in which you talk about change uh towards the end of your book um but i want to i want to kind of shift at this point and ask a kind of reflective question about about kind of the book i was i was really impressed in reading the book um by the kind of deliberate efforts that you're kind of consistently making throughout to kind of learn from other people and i found this a really kind of interesting um kind of connection between um kind of positioning yourself as a learner using a lot of kind of quotes from a variety of scholars at the beginning of your work and working with those quotes throughout the chapters but also kind of very much being an expert in this area having a kind of sense of this whole scope of information and and so yeah i'm just interested in reflections that you have about being a learner and an expert kind of simultaneously um especially in kind of spaces that work towards racial equity um so um this maybe is also a good point for me to say i mean trevor that you're someone that i have learned from too kind of along the course of this um trevor is one of the people um that i acknowledge in the books acknowledgements section for kind of modeling that learning and expertise simultaneously one of the things that i do is use quotes from the people who have inspired me to think about this work in different ways so you know the folks who are working at black bank usa um who have who i have learned a significant deal from in working together um black and brown women who are doing work in this area that have um they have shaped my thinking and so i've wanted to honor that um you know in the in the process of writing the book um the places where i'm learning things from um that there's knowledge that has come before me right that i am i hope to be part of of a continuum you know jumping in at a particular time but recognizing that that there's work that's come before me and and hopefully this will see you know also work in the future most of the quotes are from black and brown women throughout the book and so i um you know both as a white woman you know wanting to um acknowledge the great work of my colleagues um but as i mentioned kind of the contradictions and tensions um with some of the other in the context of banking um audrey lorde has this um she has this letter that she wrote uh to a white woman named mary daley who used quotes um from the work of black women to kind of like justify her own work and is a is a good and and critical and kind of poignant letter saying um you've quoted us but you haven't engaged with us at all and i think that that's a kind of a line that i will constantly walk and sometimes fail on and you know sometimes do okay on and i hope i've done um on the better side um in the context of this book but that's um that's what it's there that that's that's why those are there um and how i see myself both as a learner and and an expert um i i will say it is not always easy to be an expert in banking and finance as a as a woman where most of that content is uh is produced by folks in business and economics who are men um and and so i also felt a great need to heavily site work and kind of demonstrate a level of expertise to preempt the challenges that that might subsequently come yeah i think i think you do that incredibly well in the book i the the kind of advertising with the kind of use of these epi epitaphs to kind of start things off um and then and then a really the way that the chapter is written to kind of take us through the material but there's a lot of depth in footnotes um which kind of lets us know there's a there's a lot that we can kind of attend to i wanna i wanna step back now at this point um and shift uh in into a kind of more simple question um that i think gets that gets out a lot of the kind of issues at the center here about but how we can kind of make um make some of this more accessible and this is in the form of a video question that i'm gonna i'm gonna bring up so mckenna will ask this question hi my name is mckenna and my question is what are some ways to make financial technology more accessible to people in communities who may not have like very easy access to technology thank you thanks for that mckellen mckenna um i think um one question that i often try to ask myself which is a question that i think mariam caba is a who's a prison industrial complex abolitionist has posed for others to consider before is who's already doing work in this area and how can i learn from them or support them and i think there are a number of community efforts where communities are building their own internet systems um detroit is an example where this is happening um there's a there's a great book which i think it's a great book i haven't i haven't read it yet but i'm looking forward to it that documents um indigenous communities in mexico building their own internet systems and so you know i think looking at where people are are doing this work because it is it is happening in places um is a place to start to see you know what do people want what kinds of technologies and fintech you know do people want and when they are building it themselves what does it look like which is different than um what it looks like when a you know when a silicon valley kind of tech company decides to create something that's great um directions that i can go in now um but i think what i will i think i'm going to choose um this this question from leona may um your your book ends with a letter to the field of social work do you have a kind of similar message to those who are teaching learning or working in business fintech space that's a great question lyanna may i um i do think the message is is similar so well maybe not so similar so in that uh you know in that chapter which is a dear social work which is my profession um i i do not um always have the opportunity to connect with or to see many social workers thinking about banking and finance or or economic development um or monetary policy and and social work even with its own kind of contradictions and and and problems has the has a mission statement and has coursework embedded into its required you know required curriculum around diversity and social justice and around systems thinking and around community organizing and i don't think that coursework i i know that that sort of coursework doesn't exist to the same sort of um you know degree requirement that something that everybody takes in a business class or in an engineering class and so i want social work to be you know interested in and working on some of these questions perhaps in collaboration with those who are teaching learning and working in the in the business fintech space but i think my message to them would be a little bit different um you know they are forefronted oftentimes and and at the position of making decisions and leading on those and um too often at the end going back um and thinking about you know um i was thinking about the iphone version that is on number 13 or number 14 that just has a camera that is capable of of lighting and taking you know better photos of black and brown and darker skin tones so um it's great that that um exists and that should be something that exists in the first iteration um not the 13th one and so um so i suppose my message to the business and fintech space would be to do better sooner and more quickly so often um studies of ethics in universities are kind of dispersed into the curriculum and so at school will be able to say well we do it we do it across our curriculum but i think you're right that social work is kind of unique in in foreground in a lot of that kind of work in in the curriculum and i do think that that is something that that other kind of spaces can learn from so thinking about that a bit more and kind of taking it into a much more a much larger context again both in terms of our national history and in terms of kind of contemporary discussions i'm interested in what your thoughts are in terms of kind of reparations programs that that we have either at local or at kind of federal levels to kind of address some of the wealth gap that exists and and how those connect to kind of public finance and and some of the kind of thoughts that you have about public finance um i hope it is clear at least you know through uh other people's kind of good work on this topic and through this book talk that there are you know real structural reasons um for the racial wealth disparities that exist and and therefore i think that calls for real kind of structural responses um and there haven't been um reparations for american descendants of slavery um for black peoples um who uh whose families um were enslaved through that system and so uh so there's a real debt that uh requires repayment um and there are um both um kind of more like trevor you mentioned scale there are kind of like local efforts um where uh individual groups or um local governments are you know deciding that there are steps that they can take to repay harms that have been um inflicted by by white people and by white leaders on black and brown members of their communities or that there are disparities that they're responsible for redressing kind of in their local contexts um and i and i think one of the tensions is that um you know will these local efforts kind of undermine a federal response um and i think you know very clearly um a federal response and a federal operations program right is as needed at the federal level as as as well given that um and that's that's part of the work of um hr 40 even in its kind of complicatedness federal legislation to establish a reparations commission and an act reparations um and the work of sandy darity and kirsten mullen and and thinking about what a federal reparations program would look like that those levels of scale can happen at the same time the federal government has a debt to repay and and i think the local cities and communities that have have done harm have debts to pay too well um terry you really enriched us with this presentation it's been a a wonderful kind of yeah introducing so many different things uh we've been doing a bunch of work over this lecture series with kind of thinking about the role of the community and how that um kind of how that interacts with governments how communities kind of put their ideas forward i mean you've given us a bunch of new layers to think about with that so i'm i'm really really grateful to you for kind of offering us this and i know that there's a lot more that we could do um i've got a lot of other questions that i didn't get to um from youtube um so i want to thank everyone on youtube for kind of offering such a great discussion points um and um and so uh but i think with that we're we're we're at the end of our time together today um and so thanks again so much um for for your presentation and i want to just invite everyone to tune in again uh next friday um when we'll be talking to jonathan cohn so thanks so much thank you for having me yeah it's great [Music] [Music] you

2021-10-20 04:14

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