Eighty-five percent of white families were single-wage-earner households in 1948

Evidence

It was well established in the early twentieth century—and therefore predictable when Poe v. Seaborn was decided by the Supreme Court—that any system that gave tax cuts to single-wage-earner households like the Seaborns’ would disadvantage black married couples. But that didn’t stop anyone from changing the law. By 1948, when the joint return was accessible to everyone, 85 percent of white families were in single-wage-earner households. Four years later, in the fall of 1952, my parents met and set in motion decades of their paying more in taxes as a double-wage-earner household. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 97

Categorization

• SEED: The 1948 statistic plus ‘it was predictable’ is the seed for an essay on how legislative foreknowledge of disproportionate racial impact is itself a mechanism of structural racism.