By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
On a cold Friday morning, with coffee still warm and the country already tired, Alphonso David spoke without ornament, naming a danger that has followed this country for generations and never truly left.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, David told the Black Press of America’s Let It Be Known, is proposing a rule that would strip away key fair lending protections and make it far more difficult to prove discrimination in the credit market. The proposal would eliminate disparate impact as a tool for enforcement, narrow how discrimination and discouragement are defined, and restrict special-purpose credit programs that have helped expand access to homeownership and small business lending for people long excluded from financial markets.
“This is a public service announcement for anyone that cares about economic opportunity in the United States,” David said. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is being run by the architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, is trying to dismantle systems that ensure that people can get access to credit.”
David, one of the nation’s leading civil rights advocates, rejected any attempt to treat the proposal as technical or benign. What is being advanced, he said, is modern redlining, updated for an era of data models and algorithms rather than paper maps and red ink.
Redlining, David reminded viewers on “Let It Be Known,” was never about individual failure or financial risk. It was a deliberate system built to deny mortgages, insurance, and credit to Black and other minority families based on where they lived and who they were, cutting them off from home equity and the most common pathway to generational wealth in the United States.
“This new rule would implement modern-day redlining,” David said. “It would eliminate disparate impact, which is a tool that reveals discrimination when it shows up in outcomes, not intent.”
Disparate impact has long allowed borrowers and regulators to prove discrimination through patterns rather than admissions. David explained that discrimination rarely announces itself. Under the proposed rule, a borrower could no longer rely on evidence showing that entire neighborhoods or communities were being excluded.
“If a bank is denying all the Black people in a neighborhood loans, and you happen to be one of them, you’re not able to show that everyone else is being denied in order to prove your case,” David said.
The stakes, he said, are especially alarming given existing disparities. Black borrowers are already being denied mortgages at nearly twice the rate of White borrowers, even when income and credit profiles are comparable.
“This rule would lock those disparities in place,” David said.
David laid out examples that would become harder to challenge if the rule takes effect. A bank could stop approving loans in a predominantly Black neighborhood by labeling it high risk through an algorithm. A Black entrepreneur with strong revenues could be denied small business credit because of zip code-based scoring. Borrowers could be charged higher interest rates without the ability to show that others in their community faced the same treatment.
“The policy looks neutral on paper,” David said. “But the outcome is exclusion, and this rule would make it nearly impossible to challenge that.”
David traced the legal protections now under threat back to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. The law was originally enacted to allow women access to credit, at a time when many could not open accounts without a man’s approval. Two years later, Congress expanded the law to prohibit discrimination based on race and ethnicity.
“Congress wanted to ensure that financial institutions could not discriminate when issuing credit,” David said. “This new rule will make it that much more difficult for people of color, and in some cases women, to get credit from these institutions.”
What further unsettles David is that the CFPB itself admits it lacks data to measure the costs or benefits of the proposal.
“The agency does not have any evidence to justify this rule,” David said. “Quite the contrary.”
He pointed to data showing Black borrowers are denied mortgages at nearly twice the rate of White borrowers with comparable financial profiles, warning that the proposal would harden those inequities into policy.
With the public comment period nearing its close, David urged immediate action. He said there were fewer than five days remaining for the public to submit comments before the deadline. He encouraged viewers to contact elected officials and share the information widely, warning that policy changes often move fastest when communities are unaware.
States may provide some protection, David said, particularly those with strong fair lending laws. But federal enforcement sets the baseline, and when federal agencies retreat, enforcement becomes fragmented and weaker.
The consequences, he warned, would extend beyond individual borrowers. Black banks, already constrained in lending power, would face increased pressure as communities turn to them to fill gaps left by larger institutions.
“The burden on Black banks will increase,” David said. “They’ll be asked to close a gap that the largest institutions are allowed to widen.”
As the conversation closed, David turned from policy to memory, invoking generations who fought similar battles when the law itself was hostile.
“They’re counting on us giving up,” David said. “They’re counting on us looking the other way. And once we actually wake up, we’ll realize that we’ve reverted back to the 1950s.”
