Reparations must reform the tax code’s antiblack bias through credits and surtaxes

Evidence

I also believe that reparations legislation would have to include fundamental tax reform designed to erase the current antiblack bias in our federal income tax system. Why? Because of the significant role that tax policy plays in propping up white supremacy. As I demonstrated in The Whiteness of Wealth, Congress has created tax breaks for white Americans that are generally denied to black taxpayers, as well as loopholes for tainted wealth that are received overwhelmingly by white Americans. For black Americans, this could mean a reparations tax credit as compensation both for paying taxes for services from which they were excluded and for paying higher taxes in a system that doesn’t recognize the harmful effects of Jim Crow. It could also mean a federal income tax holiday for a period of years for every black American. For white Americans, it would include increased taxes on the richest among us, not solely because they are disproportionately white, but because their income and wealth are tainted by the systems of oppression put into place after slavery—even if individuals’ ancestors never enslaved anyone. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 558

Categorization

• XREF: Reconnects directly to The Whiteness of Wealth diagnosis, which supplies the empirical grounding; the tax-taint argument answers the ‘my ancestors never enslaved anyone’ objection head-on. — connects to: Race-disaggregated tax data is essential evidentiary groundwork for reparations-based tax credits — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 520; A flat refundable credit for black taxpayers would bypass EITC complexity and audit risk. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 544