“It” represents an unconscious thing, perhaps a number, which determines whether or not you should be trusted to pay for things that society should give to all people, the basic necessities in life: a home, job, utilities, healthcare, or education. In our experience, when traditional credit reports have very low scores, it has to do with a medical emergency, the loss of a loved one, or another disaster, for which there was no support. Credit reporting often punishes people who have already survived a difficult situation, and this is just one way that the financial system is wrong in how it distributes access and judgement.
Credit reporting helps people who already have power and access, to protect themselves and their assets. Credit reporting makes it easy for landlords, employers, and other key holders to reject people without seeing the conditions that make financial life almost impossible for MOST people. Not only is credit reporting inaccurate due to frequently inaccurate information, but they are misused as a way to prove a person’s integrity when they only reflect a selection of financial transactions. This type of objectification has leeched into most people’s sense of self, diminishing the value of a person to a spectrum of “good, fair or poor”.
CRED reports include qualitative information about a person, including their personal history as it ebbs and flows with the crafty ways they have learned to survive, the risks people have taken on behalf of others, the decisions they have made to make the world better, as well as their health, community, and the political and social conditions they experience. We believe that we can make credit reporting into something beautiful and expansive despite the heavy looting done by algorithms, discrimination, and dehumanization.