Discrimination When Buying a Car: How The Color of Your Skin Can Affect Your Car-Shopping Experience

Transportation is all about connecting people to the places they need to go—work, school, the grocery store, recreation, places of worship, the library, the bank, the doctor, or elsewhere. Some people may live in high opportunity neighborhoods, where all of these amenities exist within walking distance, but most of us require some other form of transportation at least some of the time.

Public transportation can be a great way to connect people to opportunity, but it must be accessible, reliable, and affordable. In many communities, people cannot depend on public transportation to get them where they need to go. In order to access opportunity, these people must have their own transportation—usually an automobile.

Too often, the people in this situation are people of color, whose neighborhoods have been starved of investment and whose ability to move to neighborhoods that better connect them to opportunity has been constrained by discriminatory policies and practices. And too often, when they seek a loan to finance an auto purchase, they face discrimination again.