Credit is not a neutral technology. It's a mechanism for distributing risk — and historically, that distribution has followed the lines of race and class.
There is a version of the credit story that goes like this: lending used to be subjective and therefore discriminatory. The banker decided on instinct — and instinct, being human, was biased. Then along came the credit score, which reduced the lending decision to a number derived from behavior, not identity. The bias was removed.
This story is appealing because it suggests that discrimination can be solved by removing human judgment from the loop. But the credit score did not remove discrimination from lending. It obscured the mechanisms through which discrimination operates — making it harder to see, harder to challenge, and harder to remedy.