Emily Flitter — The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America - with Kimberly Latrice Jones

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.

Emily Flitter covers banking and Wall Street for The New York Times. Before this, she spent eight years at Reuters, writing about politics, financial crimes, and the environment. Flitter holds an MA in Near Eastern studies and journalism from New York University and a BA from Wellesley College. She began her journalism career as a freelance reporter in Cairo. The White Wall is her first book.

Flitter will be in conversation with Kimberly Latrice Jones, an American author and filmmaker, known for the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, I'm Not Dying With You Tonight and for the viral video How Can We Win published during the George Floyd protest. The book was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. That same year, a seven-minute video featuring Kim using a Monopoly analogy to explain the history of racism and its impact on Black Americans went viral, being shared by Trevor Noah, LeBron James, Madonna, and more. The viral video was featured on shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She has subsequently signed an overall deal with Warner Brothers via her production company Push Films with her partner DeWayne “Duprano” Martin. Kim's literary roots run deep. She served on the Selection Committee for Library of Congress' 2016-2017 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, the 2015 Children’s Choice Illustrator Committee for The Children's Book Council, and the advisory board that created the Creative and Innovative Education Master’s Degree program at Georgia State University. She received one of the inaugural James Patterson Holiday Bookseller Bonus grants while working at the famous children’s bookstore, Little Shop of Stories.She resides in Atlanta and is the proud mother of a gifted boy.