Emma hosts Emily Flitter, finance reporter for the New York Times, to discuss her recent book The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America. Emily joins and speaks about the current NYTimes Guild walkouts and what this means for the Times worker’s fight for better pay and better benefits. Afterward Emily and Emma dive into her book, starting off with a general primer on the enormous racial wealth gap in the U.S., and how that wealth gap has persisted and even widened over the past 50+ years. She then touches on how banks have attempted to use a narrative of “racial progress” to buttress their social justice bona fides, without acknowledging the massive financial inequities that exist for Black Americans, and especially without acknowledging some significant banks like Citi’s direct roots in slavery. Emily then speaks to a large amount of emails between bank tellers of numerous bank branches and how they showed a disproportionate emphasis on scrutinizing black patrons attempting to cash checks. They then turn to algorithms, how banks use them, and how they are utilized to continue to perpetuate the myth that algorithms are race-blind and race-conscious because they lack the same human error that produces racism, a blatantly false claim (algorithms aren’t omniscient and don’t appear in the world fully formed.) Emily ends the conversation by touching on her reporting on cryptocurrency, specifically FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s attempts to assist with cities’ guaranteed income programs to curry favor with Washington politicians, attempting to give impoverished people crypto, being told that poor people shouldn’t be given an enormously speculative and unstable asset, agreeing to give them cash, then shuttering before handing over a single cent.
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And we are joined Now by Emily Flitter, a reporter covering Banking and Wall Street for the New York Times and author of the book The white Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America. Emily thanks so much for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. Of course, let’s just start a little bit of an aside but it’s so important to mention here that over a thousand unionized New York Times Workers are striking right now. It’s quite historic what’s happening here. and it’s at a time when the paper has been making a lot of money. There’s been a big acquisition with athletics. and there’s a lot of money coming in and the pay for workers at the New York Times has not reflected that increase. so if you don’t mind just speak to that and what’s happening at your paper right now. We are doing a one-day walkout. We have a thousand Guild members participating in this action. It’s really the first time it’s happened like this in decades where we’ve all stopped working for a full day. we’re trying to make the management understand how important it is to treat their employees right. it’s not just for the highest-paid journalists but all the way down to our security guards and the people who support the work that we do every day. We must have pay raises that are reflective of the environment that we’re living in. the prices in New York City have never been higher and we deserve Fair pay. We deserve Fair and affordable health care. and the company really hasn’t budged on those important issues. so we would hope that this shows them that we’re serious and that they need to listen to us and reach a deal with us that actually treats us fairly.
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