Tax policies encode assumptions from an era of legalized black exclusion

Evidence

Once I looked at the history of taxation in America, it became clear why so many tax policies have drastically different impacts on black and white families: They were created during a time when black families paid into the system without having the same legal rights to live, work, marry, vote, or receive an education as their white peers. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the thesis-level mechanism: facial neutrality plus unequal starting conditions equals engineered disparity, stated explicitly.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that latent policy structure encodes the legal-capacity inequalities of its founding era is the book’s paradigm-shifting core — a design flaw, not just bad actors.