by Jim Campen

About the author: Jim Campen, an associate for the bimonthly progressive journal Dollars & Sense, teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

As appalling as it was, an annual report on mortgage lending shocked few observers when the Clinton Administration’s top regulators unveiled it before the Senate Banking Committee in early November 1993. In keeping with past patterns, black mortgage applicants were turned down more than twice as often as whites in 1992. Indeed, the most closely watched single number indicated that things were getting worse rather than better: The ratio of the black denial rate to the white denial rate rose from 2.16 to 1 in 1991 to 2.26 to 1 in 1992.

Acknowledging Discrimination

What was different in 1993 was the response to the statistics. Instead of denying the obvious as they have in the past, government officials acknowledged that...