In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to "taxpayer citizenship--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, Camille Walsh shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims. Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, Walsh reveals how the idea of a "taxpayer" identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.

A groundbreaking exposé of racism in the American taxation system from a law professor and expert on tax policy NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND FORTUNE • “Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and what a more equitable future might look like.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why. In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed. She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream. Solving the problem will require a wholesale rethinking of America’s tax code. But it will also require both black and white Americans to make different choices. This urgent, actionable book points the way forward.

Introduction. Taxpayer citizenship and the right to education -- A shabby meanness: origins of unequal taxation -- Let them plow: beyond the black-white paradigm -- We are taxpaying citizens: separate and colorblind -- A drain on taxpayers: graduate school segregation and the road to Brown -- The white man's tax dollar: segregationists and backlash -- Taxpayers and taxeaters: poverty and the constitution -- The rich richer and the poor poorer: intersectional claims -- Conclusion. Education, inequality, and the hidden power of taxes.

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

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Fifty years ago, familiar images of the lottery would have been strange, as no state lottery existed then. Few researchers have uncovered the obscure role lotteries play in the changing composition of American taxation. Even less is known about what role race plays in this process. More than simply taxing those on the social margins, the emergence of state lotteries in contemporary American history represents something much more fundamental about state fiscal policy. This book not only uncovers the underlying racial factors that contextualize lottery proliferation in the U.S., but also reveals the racial consequences that lotteries have in terms of redistributing tax liability.

Ethnic and racial gaps in economic outcomes, labor opportunities and access to basic services, such as education and health remain a challenge throughout Latin America. Taxes and public spending are two effective tools governments have at their disposal to help close these gaps. However, fiscal policy tools are underutilized to reduce inequality in Latin America as compared to developed (OECD member) economies. This is one of the first studies disaggregated by ethnicity and race to analyze patterns of government spending and taxation, and is focused on five countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico and Uruguay. The study finds that taxes and spending are mostly colorblind in all countries, and therefore do relatively little to reduce pre-existing gaps in poverty across ethnic and racial lines. Moreover, the study observes that direct (income) taxes and direct transfers, such as conditional cash transfer programs, along with education (primary and secondary) and health services, are mostly progressive in ethno-racial terms. Meaning Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples receive more of the benefits -and bare less of the costs- compared to their share of the population. Whereas, indirect (sales) taxes, subsidies, tertiary education spending (apart from Brazil), and pension programs are far less progressive, and can be even regressive in ethno-racial terms. Meaning Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples pay more than their share. The negative distributional effects for education and pension programs are related to lower access to education and formal labor market opportunities for indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants in the countries analyzed.