Doubling Down on Racial Capitalism during COVID-19: Qualitative Interviews with Bank Employees

• Author: Anna K. Wood,Terri Friedline,Haotian Zheng,Mikal Wheatley,Seyoung Oh
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162211061277

ANNALS, AAPSS, 698, November 2021 163

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211061277

Doubling Down

on Racial

Capitalism

during

COVID-19:

Qualitative

Interviews

with Bank

Employees

By

TERRI FRIEDLINE,

ANNA K. WOOD,

MIKAL WHEATLEY,

SEYOUNG OH,

and

HAOTIAN ZHENG

1061277ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYRACIAL CAPITALISM DURING COVID-19

research-article2021

The COVID-19 Pandemic Recession has revealed

examples of systematic discrimination within a wide

range of industries, including banking. Using data from

interviews conducted with bank employees in March

and April 2020, we explore how private banks exem-

plify racialized organizations and operate within the

broader economic system of racial capitalism that prior-

itizes pursuit of profits over the interests of their cus-

tomers. We explain how the banking industry’s

responses to the pandemic reflect the logic of racial

capitalism, and we develop the theme of doubling

down to illustrate this logic and to explain the patterns

revealed in employees’ narratives. Subthemes included

pursuit of profits, bureaucratic mundane, forced

choices, history limits imagination, and dissonance. We

conclude with implications for the banking industry.

Keywords: banks; finance; racialized organizations;

discrimination; public banking

Decades of financial market expansion

(Davis 2009; Lin and Neely 2020) and

public-private partnerships (Taylor 2019; Zullo

2019) have positioned the banking industry to

assume a prominent role in the federal govern-

ment’s COVID-19 Pandemic Recession

response. The banking industry and its employ-

ees are having to respond to customers who are

struggling to pay bills and receiving CARES

Act economic stimulus relief disbursements.

The industry is also processing small business

loan applications for the Paycheck Protection

Program (PPP). However, the risks of elevating

the private banking industry to the frontlines of

Terri Friedline is an associate professor of social work

at the University of Michigan and is the author of

Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology

Won’t Save a Broken System (Oxford University Press

2021).

Anna K. Wood is a joint PhD student in social work and

sociology at the University of Michigan.

Correspondence: tfriedli@umich.edu

164 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

the pandemic responses are consequential, especially for poor and racially mar-

ginalized groups who are frequently targets of banks’ exploitation and discrimina-

tion (Baradaran 2015, 2017; Hwang, Hankinson, and Brown 2015; Hyra etal.

2013; Massey etal. 2016). For instance, banks fought debt relief to Black farmers

that was approved by Congress in March 2021, which aimed to redress past lend-

ing discrimination. In their arguments against this federal relief, banks claimed

they would not reap maximum profits if Black farmers’ loans were repaid sooner

than their original terms (Rappeport 2021).

Unequal power structures based on hierarchies of race and ethnicity shape our

institutions (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Fields and Fields 2014; Ray 2019; Tomaskovic-

Devey and Avent-Holt 2019). In this way, the banking industry functions as a part

of racial capitalism—an economic system that creates profits by stratifying eco-

nomic value based on hierarchical social constructions of desirability and worthi-

ness such as race and class (Robinson 1983). In other words, capitalism relies on

a racial hierarchy to generate profits. The banking industry operates in ways that

uphold this hierarchy, systematically benefiting whiter and wealthier individuals

and disproportionately excluding nonwhite groups. However, little scholarly

attention has been paid to the daily ways that banks confer worthiness of respon-

sible banking and stratify economic value (Massey etal. 2016; Servon 2017). This

understanding is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic’s con-

comitant public health and economic crises, where the industry’s roles are promi-

nent yet banks’ uneven implementation of practices and procedures could hinder

recovery.

This article focuses on the banking industry and its employees to explore

industry responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession while contributing to

the theoretical literature on racial capitalism (Laster Pirtle 2020; Leong 2013;

Robinson 1983). Through in-depth interviews, we sought to uncover the daily

mundane or routine ways that banks deployed practices and procedures in

responding to employees and customers during the initial months of the

pandemic. The interviews reveal the patterned narratives that employees used to

explain their responses to struggling customers, to describe processing loan appli-

cations, and to understand the contradictions of their own working conditions.

From positions that spanned their organizations’ hierarchies, employees consist-

ently described reinforcing banks’ existing standard operating procedures despite

the pandemic’s abnormal circumstances. We interpret bank employees’ narra-

tives to be describing an aspect of racial capitalism’s logic: doubling down. Bank

employees’ dissonant and contradictory narratives become congruent and

Mikal Wheatley is a graduate research assistant at the University of Michigan School of Social

Work.

Seyoung Oh is a research assistant at the National University of Singapore Centre for Family

and Population Research.

Haotian Zheng is a PhD student at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.

NOTE: Funding for this research was received from the University of Michigan’s Poverty

Solutions.