Racial tax disparity comes from ignoring race, not from race-based provisions.

Evidence

Which brings me back to the couple who started it all for me: my parents, James and Dottie Brown. I was right; they paid too much in taxes. But it wasn’t because there are separate rate tables for black and white Americans. That would be against the law. Black taxpayers like my parents pay more because U.S. tax policies ignore the reality of societal differences based on race. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 66

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the central definition: facial neutrality (no separate rate tables) is exactly what permits the engineered disparity.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the book’s whole paradigm in a paragraph — the counterintuitive claim that race-neutral law produces disproportionate racial harm precisely BECAUSE it ignores race while starting points differ.