Small private employers gave Black workers no tax-exempt benefits

Evidence

Take my father, for example: Daddy was a plumber who worked for many years for a small private company. Though his boss, Mr. Gelman, was very generous (you may recall he helped my parents buy their house), like most small employers he did not offer health insurance or a retirement plan. For years, my parents worked and raised a family paying for our healthcare with after-tax dollars, and like Racheal, we were very lucky to avoid serious illness. My parents couldn’t afford to pay for dentist visits for all four of us, so Miss Dottie took only me and my sister. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the reader’s interest in craft: Brown grounds structural claims in her own family example — after-tax healthcare dollars as a concrete cost of exclusion.