A Brief Summary Of Debtor Nation

The expansion of credit in the United States played a pivotal role in the history of American citizenship. Race was a major factor that contributed to the history of the expansion of credit and, also, to the present-day concerns of debt today. At the end of the postwar era, racial minorities were constantly denied credit, which did not allow these groups to continue to pursue the continuation of the American Dream. According to Louis Hyman’s Debtor Nation, “to be denied credit went beyond an economic inconvenience; credit access cut to the core of what it meant to be an affluent, responsible adult,” and this type of discrimination is what racial minorities, and women, were faced with in post-war America (Hyman, 173). To understand the discriminatory practices used alongside credit, it is first important to understand the access to credit in the ghettos.

Difficulties and lack of ownership in these neighborhoods contributed to the “exploitation of disadvantaged consumers,” the “selling of inferior goods,” and “charging exorbitant prices” (Hyman, 175). There was a lot of opposition from the community regarding these “outside” owners selling to the community and eventually, installment credit and repossession became a regular part of consumerism in these neighborhoods. Repossession and default rates were extremely high in the ghettos due to the exploitive relationship between the consumers and sellers (Hyman, 178). Due to this exploitive relationship, poor minorities in the ghettos were unable to keep up with installment plans and would lose the products they had already started paying