Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author,

activist, attorney, and host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. When I left private practice after working for several years in the corporate law

environment, one of the things that I was excited about was taking cases that were

really important to me. And a lot of those cases had to do with people who were dealing with a lot

of debt while working as a corporate lawyer, as a baby lawyer to be sure, but as a baby corporate

lawyer in New York City's law firms, one of the things I learned was a new language. And this was

the language about how white people

spoke money. Now, as a poor black kid, I understand very clearly understood then and understand

until this day very clearly how to navigate poverty, what behaviors have to change, the mindsets

that change, the way in which the choices that we make have to change,

that I understood and I spoke the language of poverty, of scratching and surviving,

ununderstood that and spoke it fluently when I was in the corporate law space.

But while there, I also learned how to speak white people money

and had a real appreciation for all of the tools, the tricks, the machinations that wealthy

people use in order to stay wealthy. I also understood that there was a whole lot of legal

infrastructure that was established to help poor people navigate poverty in ways that were

going to be less traumatizing and more healthy for them.

But as a formerly poor person, I also knew that even though these laws existed, most poor people

had no idea what they were. For example, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. It was one of

my favorite pieces of legislation when I was in private practice because that's a piece of

legislation that basically says, yeah, Mrs. Smith might owe you some money. favorite pieces of legislation when I was in private practice because that's a piece of legislation

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