This will be a relatively short diary, but I just wanted to share this awesome podcast discussion that I just checked out; you can basically picture me experiencing the “Galaxy Brain” meme.
Chris Hayes, of MSNBC’s All In, has a great weekly podcast entitled Why Is This Happening, which enables this tremendously wonky news anchor to drill down into specific issues or intellectual questions that are too involved to fit into the “A block” of his primetime cable news show. This week, his guest was the Emory tax law professor Dorothy A. Brown, author of what looks to be a fascinating new study entitled The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And What We Can Do About It.
I know that tax law isn’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea; indeed, people’s dubious enthusiasm for tax law is the butt of numerous jokes throughout the episode. (Among other things, professor Brown is hilarious.) But the episode (and Brown’s book) gets at an important of racism and white supremacy that gets less attention, given our understandable focus on the more immediately visible manifestations of white supremacy, as it is embodied in antiblack police violence or the inequities of the criminal justice system or the era of mass incarceration. But the discrepancies in the tax law that favor white over Black taxpayers are an instance of hidden, systemic sites of inequality, of a kind that we might call Inequity By Spreadsheet.
Brown starts by outlining how she came to the subject, as a trained accountant and specialist in tax law who ironically arrived at this specialization as a way to have a reprieve from the day-to-day operation of racism: she believed, like many of us might, that tax law is “just numbers,” and that following the explicit elimination of de jure discrimination since the implementation of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, that this would be a site of governmental operation, surely, untouched by the operation of racism.
The moment that professor Brown came to realize that there was actually something structurally off about tax law was after a certain number of times doing her parents’ taxes, alongside her own. Every April 15th, she realized that the roughly equal earnings of her two parents — her mother was a nurse, and her father was a plumber — contributed to a tax burden that was strangely close to her own, even though she had a much higher income. She notes that she came to realize that the way that joint married filing functioned for dual income families imposed a kind of “marriage penalty” on married couples who had roughly equal earnings. This would be relatively common in Black communities where women worked in much greater numbers than white women, and it meant a distinction between her parents’s situation and that of, say, a white male investment banker married to a white stay-at-home mother, where the tax burden would be proportionately less. (This is my layperson understanding of this, based upon my hearing the podcast, so if there are tax accountants out there tearing their hair out over my errors, please feel free to correct me in the comments.)
At the same time, she noted that a law school mentor of hers had written an article that enjoined other legal scholars to locate those areas of the law where structural racism operated unnoticed. Brown’s own thought was, this definitely has to be a facet of tax law that has gone unscrutinized, and so she began to work on this, with her findings culminating in what looks like a tremendous new book on the subject.
Among the other areas of tax law where professor Brown located significant disparities by race:
— with inheritance law, the ability of families to pass along gifts or inheritances to the next generation tax-free favors communities that were already benefitting from wealth disparities created by structural racism. Here, the conversation turns to a particularly eye-popping dimension of the racial wealth gap:
Chris Hayes: I think the single most shocking statistic around racial inequity in the U.S. in the year 2021 I think continues in just black and white terms is the racial wealth gap.
Dorothy Brown: Right. And when we think about the racial wealth gap, the statistic that has always been eye-opening for me is, a white high-school dropout has more wealth than a Black college graduate. That’s when you realize, something is wrong with the system for building wealth, and it is not designed for black wealth.
Brown goes on to point out that, for Black families who have not accumulated intergenerational wealth, people are frequently forced to choose between directing modest savings towards care for parents on the one hand, or for putting money into a college savings plan for children on the other. (The broader question of historical wealth disparities between Black and White families was the subject of the important book by Thomas Shapiro and Melvin Oliver, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality.)
— with homeownership, the ability to exempt up to $500,000 in profit from the sale of a home is a tax exemption that disproportionately benefits white families. This has to do with the fact that, in the postwar era, the now well-known practice of redlining — where government maps designated regions in communities of color as being higher risk for mortgage lending than the all-white suburbs — ensured that home ownership would be overwhelmingly restricted to white families.
(Just to make sure that white families would be the overwhelmingly likely beneficiaries of home ownership policy, there were two additional mechanisms available, which Brown doesn’t get to but which are certainly part of the picture: racial covenants, which explicitly specified that home ownership in a given subdivision was restricted to white families, and the mortgage subsidization of the G.I. Bill, which was nominally race neutral but which in practice was often administered by local banks that explicitly discriminated against applicants of color. Ira Katznelson gets into this in his important if fiercely contested text, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.)
A particularly dispiriting part of the podcast was when professor Brown outlines the considerable resistance that she got from the field of tax law studies when she would present these findings at academic conferences: there would be tremendous pushback against the claim that race had anything to do with this, arguing that class was the overwhelming determinant. But what she points out is that many of these same mechanisms of disparity continued to operate independently of income: that even when one went further up the income ladder, you would continue to see significant disparities in the tax burden of more affluent Black taxpayers and White taxpayers, due to some of the mechanisms outlined above. In some cases, the mechanisms in question weren’t produced to explicitly discriminate against Black families, but they assumed that white family patterns (for instance, the single-breadwinner white nuclear family) were normative. But Brown points out the degree to which many of the exemptions that we take for granted were integrated into the tax code before the changing legal landscape of Brown v. Board of Education, or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, had begun to dismantle de jure discrimination in the American legal system.
Anyhow, I strongly recommend that you check out this fascinating podcast, which helps to get at the many areas of American life where racism and white supremacy operate in an area that we would otherwise assume to be the stuff of boring numerical abstraction.
