Calculating race: racial descrimination in risk assessment, Wiggins, Benjamin (affiliate Assistant Professor Of History, Affiliate Assistant Professor Of History, University Of Minnesota)

Next, he investigates the role of race in the state-sponsored mortgage insurance program of the Federal Housing Administration between the start of the New Deal and the beginning of the Cold War and its prolonged effects on mortgage lending. Wiggins concludes with an analysis of the use of race in
the statistical risk assessments across financial institutions and government programs during the post-civil rights movement era, and how that practice has been transformed in the twenty-first century through proxy variables which stand in for the now taboo category of race. Offering readers a new
perspective on the historical importance of actuarial science in structural racism, Calculating Race is a particularly timely contribution as Big Data and algorithmic decision making increasingly pervade our lives.