Economic Inequality + Resiliency with Louise Story (part 2)

When Louise Story, co-author of "15 Cents on the Dollar," joins us, we pull back the veil on the stark racial economic disparities that many Black and Latino Americans face, often unseen. Our conversation is not just a litany of statistics but a mosaic of human resilience, as we share the voices of those who battle systemic obstacles daily. The story of James, who fought tooth and nail to keep his home, echoes the broader narrative of a community's struggle for equality in homeownership—a struggle that's both heartrending and inspiring.

Our exploration doesn't stop at personal anecdotes; it encompasses the extensive historical and present-day challenges that perpetuate the black-white wealth gap. From the nuances of real estate ownership to the authenticity behind black-owned businesses and the dynamics of workplace equity, we tackle it all. Story's insights, drawn from a rich tapestry of over 400 interviews, challenge us to understand the complex layers of economic inequality and, more importantly, how we, as individuals, can contribute to a more equitable future. Join us and be part of the dialogue that could ignite not just awareness but action.

Louise is a prize-winning investigative journalist who spent more than 15 years at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she was the top masthead editor running coverage strategy. Her work investigating corruption led to the largest kleptocracy forfeiture in U.S. history, a scandal known as the 1MDB case. Her work during the 2008 financial crisis led to a multi-billion dollar settlement in the derivative market and to Goldman Sachs’s S.E.C. settlement. Projects she led have received honors including Emmy Awards, Pulitzer Prize finalist citations, and Online News Association awards. Louise’s film "The Kleptocrats" aired on the BBC, Apple and Amazon. She teaches about racial wealth gaps at The Yale School of Management.

https://15cents.info

Transcript

Pam: 0:06

In the grand theater of life. We all seek a comeback, a resurgence, a rekindling of our inner fire. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience. This is not just another podcast. This is a journey, a venture into the heart of human spirit, the power of resilience and the art of reigniting our passions.

Natalie: 0:29

Welcome back to part two of our two-part interview with Louise Story. We are excited to dive back in. We're going to hear a little bit more about some of the stories that are featured in the book 15 Cents on the Dollar. We hear from Louise that there were over 400 individuals interviewed for this book and those that were chosen are definitely those that have had tremendous impact in various sectors of our economy. We hope you enjoy.

Louise Story: 0:57

This is some of the load and this comes out in our book that, natalie, from your lived experience you would know but some white Americans don't know there's a constant load for black Americans, latino Americans as well, for groups of people who face discrimination, wondering, in a lot of situations there's this load of like well, is something different going to happen to me? And it's even things like. You know, my co-author and I at one point we were in Georgia driving around and we were investigating one of the people in our book. It's a really sad story. His father was shot by a police officer while he was sitting in his car. So we were down there reporting on that and asking some tough questions on that in a small town in rural Georgia. We're driving along and this police car starts trailing us. Remember, we're like reporting on someone who got shot by a police officer right there.

Louise Story: 1:53

Sam Pulse was kind of like okay, I wasn't that worried about it. And my co-author was like okay, louise, I know what we're doing, I've got the plan. Like I'm turning in this parking lot, just wave and smile. When I say wave and smile, so I'm like okay, so she pulls in a church parking lot, turns around, so her car faces that car, so the officer can see us and she goes, wave and smile, so we both wave and smile and then we drive on and then he didn't follow us and she said you know, that's part of the plan. You know a lot of people Black Americans understand you need to immediately show you're not a threat, there's no problem, and there's all kinds of examples like this that white people do not routinely think about, but that in all settings the workplace, investments, the bank all kinds of settings that Black Americans think about.

Natalie: 2:42

It's an unspoken thing and it just becomes second nature, right? I think it just becomes habit in many instances. And with Ebony's example, I mean, you were not even thinking about creating a plan and here she's like I've got a plan and you need to, we need to be in this together, right? This is because you need to be aware of what you're going to get. May enter into right, yeah, yeah. Well, louise, you mentioned that you guys interviewed over 400 people. There are seven story lines that we follow along in the book. Tell us how you came to the seven story lines and maybe a little bit of a teaser on what we can expect. We don't want you to give the book away. You can find the book on Amazon if you didn't pick up on that before. You can pre-order before June 18th. But, yeah, how did you guys come down to the seven storylines and what can we expect?

Louise Story: 3:32

Sure.

Louise Story: 3:33

Well, I know that the theme of the podcast is resilience and I think that's such an important quality, and so maybe I'll just tell you a story a little bit about one of the people in the book, which is a real estate story but also shows resilience and some of the difficulties in this space, and I'll tell you how we found this person.

Louise Story: 3:50

So we find people all different ways. We started out broad interviewing people in civil rights organizations, just learning about where have they seen examples of challenges created by the black white wealth gap, challenges created by the black white wealth gap and we were interviewing one lawyer when we were first starting off the project, who worked for the legal aid society. He was a pro bono lawyer who told us he had a client who owned a house in a rent to own contract and in fact, he now was in a battle to keep the house and he loved this house so much that in fact, he had bought the same house two times, both times in a rent-to-own contract. And evan and I were like we have to meet this person who loves this house so much, he's bought the same house twice and he's fighting to keep it and so we convinced the lawyer to introduce us. This man was really not looking for press at all. He was was kind of like what?

Pam: 4:42

do you guys want Like he was?

Louise Story: 4:43

busy. He runs a small barbecue stand at the side of a gas station. It's just a grill and an umbrella and he runs that usually every day, 2 pm to 2 am. And this man has been in prison a few times and did not go to college. But over 20 years ago he was walking through a neighborhood in Atlanta where his aunts and his grandparents had lived and he remembered it from being a kid there. It was a safe feeling to him and he saw a house available for rent to own and he didn't think, having been in prison and with his financial track record, he could get a bank loan. But that sounded really good to him that he could pay it off as he's renting. So we went into a rent to own contract in 2005. And then what happened was the person who was in the contract with him person who had sold the house and the rent to own that person had a mortgage with the bank and that person then didn't pay off his mortgage as the financial crisis brewed and that person got foreclosed on and when that person was foreclosed on and that person got foreclosed on and when that person was foreclosed on, that person did not get the bank to honor the contract with the man His name is James, the man in our book and so despite three years of making payments, poof it all goes up.

Louise Story: 5:58

So he moves out, moves to a rental around the corner and that house is sold to an investor and then out of foreclosure.

Louise Story: 6:06

Then he sees a new rent to own sign go up by this investor, so he goes back and he buys the house again.

Louise Story: 6:12

So I think this is a very interesting case of resilience, because he lost the house and when he lost it the first time just so you know, like when people rent to own it's their home and they invest a lot like he put in new wires, the copper wiring was messed up in some areas.

Louise Story: 6:27

Actually copper is very expensive, so copper wires get stolen out of homes to replace the wires. He did a lot of work on the house because it was his home that he was paying off and so he wanted that house back, even though he had been kicked out when that foreclosure happened. The foreclosure had nothing to do with him and so he went into a new rent to own contract with this new investor and then he was in that. It was a pretty good situation for six, seven years and by the time we met the lawyer, though, that investor had told it to another investor and now that next investor was trying not to honor his seven years of payments, and that's when we started following him and we follow the twist and turns of it and fights for this house, and I really think you'll find this story interesting in the book, and he shows a lot of resilience.

Natalie: 7:12

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean that's resilience and determination, I think, to a degree that many of us don't see.

Louise Story: 7:20

No, no, I mean, many people in life have many challenges, but this housing situation they went through yeah, I don't think everyone has had this level of a housing challenge Just like really, really had to fight for his rights of ownership.

Natalie: 7:37

Oh, my goodness. And so with James's story, are you able to do kind of a ancestral line as well, that historical reflection of wealth within his family line?

Louise Story: 7:50

yeah, with pretty much all of our pretty much all of our people. We follow their family line through and understood where they are and things that affect their family. He was born and raised in atlanta so, yeah, we followed. We had people who we first of all. We ended up knowing more about their families than they did. When you go back, yeah, what happened before?

Louise Story: 8:12

And for example, you may be familiar with the Freedman's Bank. That's a bank that was created after the Civil War by the federal government and marketed as to formerly enslaved people, and they were encouraged to put their money in there to keep it safe. And then, in what I think is one of the worst financial frauds in history, the people running the bank, who were some very well-connected white bankers the Cook brothers they basically used those black deposits to buy out some really bad loans from one of their own personal banks and they collapsed this Freedman's Bankance bank, and over time, over a long time, the depositors got some money back, but not all of it, and this actually created a lot of distrust in banking because of this experience. But we found relatives of our people alive today who were depositors there and who lost their money there, and our people today had no idea that they had. So that's how we tell the history, as you see it, in people's families yeah, yeah, it's just generational yeah, yeah, wow, oh my gosh.

Natalie: 9:12

Well, I'm excited to dive into the book. I can't wait until it's released next month. I think this is a fabulous resource for everyone. I know that the example that Louise shared today is one in the real estate space, but the other stories are not all necessarily connected to real estate.

Louise Story: 9:29

For student loans for entrepreneurs and the challenges about building a business. Yeah, as I think I mentioned earlier, we earlier we cover the justice system. We really cover we cover the professional workplaces and whether there's equitable promotions. We cover pay gaps within industries. We really try to cover pretty much all the things big factors in in the black white wealth gap. So there's a lot there. Land ownership, there's real estate and housing now is very important. There's also a long history over which families were able to get land in the 1800s and on to 1900. So we cover that. Lots of tentacles.

Pam: 10:14

Well, and I also noticed that if you go to your site, you get what it's from, and so, instead of going to Amazon, I would just encourage people to go there and click on that and do your part, because I was like beautiful. We just don't, we don't think about it, we don't think about it.

Louise Story: 10:30

So it's 15centsinfo it's one five centsinfo is the link and 19 cents dot info it's one five cents dot info is the link. And we did put us many black owned bookstores and we cover quite a lot in the book about black owned business and we cover some black owned banks and we we raised some questions about what does it mean to be black owned? Because it turns out that sometimes sometimes companies're Black-owned but they're not really Like maybe they're Black-run Like throughout history. There's a lot of examples where things have gotten marketed to people, where as Black enterprises. For example, there's a recent example we give in the book called the Black News Channel, which was a new television network that was started in early 2020. Was a new television network that was started in early 2020. And it was marketed as like a black news network for black people, but it's not owned by black people. The top programming leader was an individual television executive and he was very open about like how there's just not enough black ownership of these things and and and their, their staff jobs. They're not ownership. So we cover that.

Louise Story: 11:36

We cover some research about recirculation. You know people talk about recirculating your dollar within a community. We cover how. That's actually much more difficult to do today because of the internet and online shopping and the fact that most stores aren't local and, like the way money flows today, that's not as doable as, for example, 100 years ago, if people shopped in one town and they couldn't travel very far and there was no internet. There would be more recirculation. So, yeah, we cover a lot. It really it's a book that will make you think, you know, and some of the things by the end that happen are sad. But one of the things that we felt was hopeful is that all of the people we feature in the book people like James, who I told you about despite some real setbacks happening to them- they're all still hopeful and they're all still working really hard to bring up their families well, and so I think that's really inspiring to and to remember that, like people carry hope, people work hard.

Louise Story: 12:38

And we give personal recommendations at the end of the book because I think when people finish this they're going to want to know, like, what can I do? And you know, most people can't actually go wave a wand and change federal policy, but people can change things in their own life.

Pam: 12:54

Yeah.

Louise Story: 12:54

So we give a bunch of recommendations, and one recommendation that we give that I think will resonate with you two doing this show together is we recommend that people partner in a meaningful way with someone who's very different, and we give an example. We're an example of partnering across racial lines, because Ebony is black and I am white and our learnings on this book have been from interviews, research and data, but it's also come from us trying to create an equitable partnership with each other. We have spent a lot of time, money we have a reputational line with us and thinking through like well, what is fairness? It's not always as simple as it seems. It's not always like oh, you put in a dollar, I put in a dollar, because, like, dollars affect people differently.

Louise Story: 13:43

Or you put in an hour, I put in an hour. Well, sometimes hours are harder to come by and it's much more complicated than that. And I think if more people not just hired someone differently, but like partnered and tried to make things as equal as possible, they would understand that in our communities we need more give and take, like we can't just be like all right, the door's open, everyone can do the same thing. We need more give and take to recognize the situation that people are in and what effort and what they can do, and honor and respect and appreciate the things people can do.

Pam: 14:14

Absolutely, and I think this book is a huge step towards just educating people because just the stories you've told me, it's like I didn't even realize it and I think it's just that's a first step. And if more people and I see this being a book that's going to be in schools, I feel like it's a book that's going to be part of D&I trainings, it's going to be part of expanding housing opportunities classes through NAR and other organizations, because it starts with just educating ourselves to what's going on instead of pretending like well, it doesn't affect me, so I don't really need to know about it. But ultimately it does.

Natalie: 14:53

Absolutely, pam. You hit the nail on the head. You kind of like took the words out of my mouth, because I think this gives us an opportunity, not necessarily to take ownership, but to have a better understanding. Right, we don't need to take ownership. I think you said that some of your tracking goes back to like the early 1800s, right? So it's not that we're saying take ownership for everything that has happened since the beginning of time, but it helps us to have a better understanding of how everyone is arriving to where we are in this moment today, like wherever we are at that time.

Louise Story: 15:22

Yeah, I agree with you. People don't want to feel like they're responsible.

Louise Story: 15:27

Right's the word, yeah but I will say that I think it's good for people to be knowledgeable about, yes, and I'll just tell you for myself, and I think this is something that would be beneficial for people of all races to do to learn more about what points in their family's history did their family have an advantage or a disadvantage because of their race or their religion or you know some sort of identifier? People will think differently about it and I will tell you. For my case, I had a really big aha moment because my father was the first in his family to go to college and worked very hard throughout his entire life, and my mom always emphasized to us as children, like your dad's self-made, you know first to go to college. He was a physician and him being a doctor provided my siblings and I with the ability to, for example, go to college without much student debt. So and I really you know, believe that, and I know there's a lot of people out there who say, well, my parents worked really hard. My parents are the first in their family to go to college, so my family didn't really get anything better than anyone else.

Louise Story: 16:37

But I had a really big aha moment because I always look up where streets are named after and there's a street in Atlanta that one of the people in our book lives on and it's called Hamilton Holmes Highway.

Louise Story: 16:49

So I was like who's Hamilton Holmes? So I Googled Hamilton Holmes and I found out he was the first black person to go to Emory Medical School and he went to Emory Medical School three years before my father went to Emory Medical School. And all of a sudden I realized if my dad had been four years older and black, no matter how hardworking he was and the fact that he was self-made and all that he couldn't have gone there. So in fact, even though he worked so hard and earned so much of what he did, he did have an advantage that he would not have had if he was four years earlier and black. And just realizing that to me was like ground shaking. I texted all my siblings and I just said I think you all need to know this is something that, even though he worked so hard and built so much for himself that he did have that was a privilege that some other people didn't have.

Pam: 17:43

Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie: 17:45

That's something that's typically at the forefront for me. I'm an immigrant to the US, so I definitely see that A lot of my family still lives in Jamaica. And that moment, right, it's that decision, that moment that I'm here, and it's every choice and decision that I make moving forward, because I know that I'm already starting out at an advantage compared to me continuing to live and grow up in a third world country right, fabulous place to vacation. And the realization is Jamaica is a country that has a tremendous amount of poverty and that one shift of just being able to live in the US is huge. I don't take a lot for granted, but I love the way that you kind of pose that question At what points did you have an advantage and a disadvantage? Right, because those are both important.

Louise Story: 18:34

Yeah, yeah, oh, my gosh, that's beautiful, for people to understand that I think, honestly, almost all people work really hard. There's so many people who are not getting paid very much in jobs who are working really hard and just because we all work so hard for success doesn't mean in fact that we're better necessarily than those other people. And for people just to be honest about the luck, the inheritance not only inheritance necessarily I'm not talking specifically financial but the inheritance of access to things I can do, specifically financial, but the inheritance of access to things people talk with other people with a more open mind and embrace that we're life in a little different place.

Pam: 19:18

Also, some of it has to do with you know where you were born. When we were born, just all of those things just impact the things that we've had in our lives, whether advantage or disadvantage. All right, so what's next? So you've got this book coming and you're doing tours. Right now you are traveling all over to promote the book. Where can people find you? Where can they? Can they come see you?

Louise Story: 19:40

Oh, thank you. We're doing a little bit of travel Okay Entrepreneurial to do a book. So it's like our pockets. We're doing the best we can. But we will be doing some things in June and if people go to our website one, five cents dot info, there's a link down there to click over to our events page and they'll see where we are and we'll be out on TV and the radio a lot the week, you know, as the book comes out and I'm so glad to have gotten to give you guys a little early. Yes, you and we're also very open people People from our website they can sign up for our newsletter. If they get our newsletter and they wanted to click reply, they'll get an email right to us. So we're happy to hear what people think about this.

Pam: 20:20

Perfect. Yep, I signed up for the newsletter today, so I'm super excited about that and I just absolutely love what you two are doing, and I see it's going to make a huge impact.

Natalie: 20:32

Thank you Absolutely, oh my gosh, absolutely. Well, is there anything else that you'd like to leave our listeners with before we tune?

Louise Story: 20:40

out. No, but it's been really great talking with you both. I love the energy and I'm really excited to hear it and if there's anything else I can send you or whatever and if you don't mind, like, let me know when it's out so I can push it out to people. Natalie, I got to text Will and tell him this is a great intro. I feel like I have a new friend and either of you guys, if you get to New York, I'd love to take you to coffee.

Pam: 21:02

Oh, I would love it.

Natalie: 21:04

I will be there up on that. I love it. We will definitely take you up.

Pam: 21:08

Maybe we'll do a Think Week in New York Natalie, Ah, yeah.

Natalie: 21:12

Yeah, I think that would be a nice little change. We typically do our Think Week somewhere warmer, but New York. I think early summer in New York is great. We could do that.

Pam: 21:23

Yes, a different inspiration, I think so too I love it, I love it.

Louise Story: 21:28

Thank you guys, thank you, thank you for helping me spread word of this. Thank you, absolutely Fabulous.

Natalie: 21:34

Well, thank you, Louise. All right, you guys, you heard it 15 cents on the dollar. You can check out 15centsinfo for additional information. And if you would like additional information about Reignite Resilience and where we are and what we have going on, head on over to reigniteresiliencecom. Until next time. We'll see you all soon. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Reignite Resilience. We hope that you had amazing ahas and takeaways. Remember to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like it and download the upcoming episodes, and if you know anyone in your life that is looking to continue to ignite their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes and until then, continue to reignite that fire within your hearts.