,
12 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
A few years ago, I wrote that if you’re black, you’re more likely to see your electricity cut, be sued over a debt, or land in jail because of a parking ticket. Since then, without setting out to, I’ve been adding to that list. propublica.org/article/why-sm…
I wrote that piece after a series of stories on debt collection lawsuits. The disparate burden on black neighborhoods jumped out of the data at us, so we did a story about it. propublica.org/article/debt-c… 
When I was talking to people about those lawsuits, it was apparent to me that the bankruptcy system wasn’t working. People were having their lives turned upside down by having their wages seized over an old debt, but they saw no way out.
So next I did a bunch of work on bankruptcy. And once again, the numbers just about reached out of the spreadsheet and hit us over the head. Major racial disparities. This time, it was about the type of bankruptcy. projects.propublica.org/graphics/bankr…
Bankruptcy costs money, mostly attorney fees. And because they couldn’t afford that cost, black debtors were more likely to end up in a type of bankruptcy with a payment plan. If you can’t keep up the payments, your debts come back.
People get trapped. Our story focused on Memphis, home of the country’s highest bankruptcy filing rate: features.propublica.org/bankruptcy-ine…
Then I took a big right turn and started covering the IRS and taxes. Honestly, I wasn’t looking for it, and once again, we found racial disparities that are impossible to ignore.
Yesterday, we ran a map showing where IRS audits are most common, by county. The top five most audited counties in the country are rural, mostly black counties in the South. (The IRS says it doesn’t factor race in audit selection.) projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-…
This is largely a reflection of income: over 1/3 of IRS audits are of people who claim the earned income credit, which is meant to pull poor workers out of poverty. Read our earlier story if you want to know why this is such a focus for the IRS: propublica.org/article/earned…
It’s not hard to imagine someone who was counting on that EITC refund to make a car payment or an electricity bill or to pay their bankruptcy attorney… and then when they didn’t get it, things really went downhill.
All these big disparities reflect our country’s history. In our stories about debt, we focused on the racial wealth gap as a key factor. Addressing that root cause is a big task, but some of the 2020 candidates are talking about it vox.com/future-perfect…
At the same time, as I’ve found over and over, there are so many different systems that conspire to make it harder for people to move forward. They are fixable problems! If anyone wants to fix them, here are some ideas: propublica.org/article/when-y… propublica.org/article/what-c…
