Reparations should include tax reform targeting structural antiblack bias
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
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: Directly extends the thesis of ‘The Whiteness of Wealth’; tax reform is the structural-mechanism piece that separates Brown’s remedy from simple cash-payout plans.
- ADDENDUM: The ‘tainted wealth’ tax argument parallels the way the sacrifice chapter treats inherited benefit from historical harm as a present moral obligation.
Related
- Reparations must reform the tax code’s antiblack bias through credits and surtaxes (similarity 0.94)
- Reparations must fund systemic change, not just individual cash payments. (similarity 0.81)
- Reparations must transform wealth-building systems, not just pay cash (similarity 0.81)
- Structural systems, not individual prejudice, are the primary target of reparations (similarity 0.80)
- Racial data publication, flat progressivity, and reparations credit would close the gap (similarity 0.79)
- Reparations should cover all black Americans, not just slave descendants (similarity 0.79)
- Property taxation has a documented 150-year history of anti-Black bias (similarity 0.78)