THE WHITENESS OF WEALTH

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.