Racist policy outcomes are engineered through measures that never name their racial purpose.

Evidence

What we need now is greater understanding of why tax policy matters. When you vote at the federal, state, and municipal levels, remember that the people who created and upheld the racist policies that set black Americans behind rarely said outright that that’s what they were doing. Just look at the voter suppression efforts taking place today, which consistently make it more difficult for black Americans to vote, but never acknowledge that that’s the explicit purpose. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 563

Categorization

• DEFINE: Encapsulates the book’s central concept: facial neutrality as the mechanism of engineered disparity — the policy never says it is about race.