An explosive and deeply reported look at the systemic racism inside
the American financial services industry, from acclaimed New York
Times finance reporter Emily Flitter.
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a
Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to
investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry,
and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the
shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions.
Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan
Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo, The White Wall reveals the
practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it
was during the Jim Crow era. Flitter exposes hiring and layoff policies
designed to keep Black employees from advancing to high levels; racial
profiling of customers in internal emails between bank tellers; major
insurers refusing to pay Black policyholders' claims; and the systematic
denial of funding to Black entrepreneurs. She also gives a voice to
victims, from single mothers to professional athletes to employees
themselves: people who were scammed, lied to, and defrauded by the
systems they trusted with their money, and silenced when they attempted
to speak out and seek reform.
Flitter connects the dots between data, history, legal scholarship, and
powerful personal stories to provide an assiduously reported,
eye-opening look at what it means to bank while Black. As America
continues to confront systemic racism and pave a path forward, The
White Wall is an essential examination of one of its most caustic
contributors.
