The Sum of Us

McGhee opens Chapter 27 with a description of Janice and Isaiah Tomlin, a Black couple who became the first people in their families to own a home after they bought a two-bedroom house in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1970s. Twenty years later, they were approached by a company presenting itself as a mortgage broker, asking if the Tomlins wanted to refinance their home. Because the couple were looking for a way to pay for their children’s school tuition, they accepted—and became one of the Black households disproportionately targeted by lenders looking to sell subprime loans, which have higher interest rates and fees, and are meant for buyers with a less-than-prime credit scores. Many borrowers targeted for subprime mortgages, however, had good credit scores and could have qualified for lower-interest loans. Instead, they struggled to keep up with mortgage payments, or had their homes foreclosed when they were no longer able to pay. The Tomlins, along with more than 1,000 other homeowners, were able to keep their home through a class-action lawsuit against the lender, but they were the exception. As McGhee notes, subprime mortgages would eventually precipitate the 2008 financial crisis: “The earliest predatory mortgage lending victims, disproportionately Black, were the canaries in the coal mine, but their warning went unheeded” (74).