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Why is this racial ?

Because it gets more clicks than "towns in dire economic straits struggle to deal with debt collectors." Zeitgeist etc etc.

From TFA:

>The disparity was not merely because black families earn less than white families. Our analysis of five years of court judgments from three metropolitan areas — St. Louis, Chicago and Newark — showed that even accounting for income, the rate of judgments was twice as high in mostly black neighborhoods as it was in mostly white ones.

Accounting for income, but not accounting for indebtedness and more crucially, debt delinquency.

It'd be one thing if these lenders were disproportionately targeting black borrowers and letting white borrowers slide. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

As you say, they found a racial, not socioeconomic, difference in debt lifecycles. That's why it's racial.

One paragraph later, they also propose that the disparity is likely because black families have less accumulated household wealth and so are more likely to end up in delinquency than white borrowers of the same income. Like a lot of racial disparities, it doesn't come down to explicit racism by companies or debt collectors, just by a confluence of societal factors that leave minorities in a more precarious financial position.

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