Blacks were not any more likely than whites to be late on a payment, in a survey completed by think tank Demos and the NAACP economic department that studied moderate-income American households with some credit card debt for the study. The study also took note that blacks were also no more likely than whites to declare bankruptcy or get evicted.
However the study did find this:
- Blacks have lower credit scores on average than white Americans;
- That chasm widened during the Great Recession that America has yet to fully recover from;
- Subprime lenders were more likely to target blacks during the housing boom. Those loans, with ballooning interest rates, had a much higher default rate. This resulted in credit scores that could be marred for “decades,” The Washington Post reported in 2012.
“African American households are more likely to have been called by bill collectors because they are more likely to have blemishes on their credit history that would send debts to collection agencies,” Catherine Ruetschlin, an author of the Demos report, told The Huffington Post.
