An eye-opening look at race-based economic biases, with reasonable steps to undo them.
Black Americans endure endless injustices and indignities—not least of which are the inequities built into what is supposed to be a neutral tax system.
Brown went into tax law, she writes, because she imagined that “as far as tax law was concerned, the only color that mattered was green.” Her effort to escape racism didn’t work as expected. Over the years, she has worked to uncover biases—both intentional and not—in the federal tax system. For instance, the joint tax return system was the product of a ploy on the part of Henry and Charlotte Seaborn, a wealthy White couple who filed a suit that went all the way to the Supreme Court. They lived in a community property state, and when Henry declared that half of his income was his wife’s and their marginal tax rate should be half what it was, the IRS rejected the claim until the justices ruled in the Seaborns’ favor. But what of states where community property was not the law? “This was a violation of the horizontal equity principle underpinning the progressive tax system,” Brown writes, and it penalized Black married couples who, unlike Whites, earned roughly equal pay and could not lower their tax burden by transferring it to their partner. Similarly, notes the author, mortgage interest deductions benefit White holders disproportionally, in part because home values are lower in marginalized communities. “Homeownership is not a straightforward wealth builder for black families,” writes Brown, “because the only guaranteed return on their investment is to buy in a community where they will be a small and vulnerable minority.” School loans are another realm of difference, leading Brown to propose that wealthy institutions such as Yale be taxed to fund scholarships. Among her other remedies are taxing inheritances and, more daringly, eliminating exclusions so that “all income is taxable,” thus doing away with inequitable shelters that favor White over Black taxpayers.
An eye-opening look at race-based economic biases, with reasonable steps to undo them.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-57732-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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