A white couple’s fraudulent return earned Supreme Court vindication, not prison

Evidence

The Fosters weren’t the first Americans to try to challenge the tax system by filing a deliberately fraudulent return; the Seaborns, you’ll recall, did something similar in 1927 when they split Henry Seaborn’s income between their tax returns and invented a married-filing-separately exemption amount, putting them in a lower tax bracket. While the IRS also challenged their returns, they didn’t end up in jail; instead they paid the taxes, hired lawyers, and took their case to the Supreme Court, where they won and their fraudulent claim paved the way for the joint filing benefit. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Sharpens the earlier chapter on the marriage penalty and joint filing benefit — the Seaborns’ precedent is the origin story of the very marriage provisions that disadvantage black families.
• DEEPTHINKING: The parallel is devastating and not rhetorical: identical crime, opposite outcomes, one family’s fraud canonized as law while the other’s fraud lands a thirteen-year sentence. The contrast does the argument’s work without her stating it.