Access to Credit

In Borrowing Equality, Professor Atkinson deftly demonstrates Congress’s nonsensical bifurcation of the twin concepts of “credit” and “debt,” whereby it celebrates and encourages the former and regulates and punishes the latter. She then shows that, in refusing to acknowledge the harmful consequences of indebtedness while legislating credit-based solu­tions to inequality, these credit policies in fact entrench the very hierar­chies...

For the last fifty years, Congress has valorized the act of borrowing money as a catalyst for equality, embracing the proposition that equality can be bought with a loan. In a series of bedrock statutes aimed at democ­ratizing access to loans and purchase money for marginalized groups, Congress has evinced a “borrowing-as-equality” policy that has largely focused on the capacity of “credit,” while acoustically separating...