The joint tax return harms black families disproportionately despite facial neutrality.

Evidence

Conventional wisdom assumes the tax subsidy for marriage benefits all married Americans equally, and doesn’t give much consideration to its effects across race and income groups. When I saw that my parents’ two incomes added up to a higher tax bill than had they remained single and filed individually, I started to question the conventional wisdom—and found that while in theory the provision should affect everyone equally, regardless of race, in practice it has a disproportionately detrimental impact on black couples. How a tax provision used by almost all married couples—the joint return—came to harm black families and their ability to build intergenerational wealth tells us much about American tax policy, its history, and its intentions. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 82

Categorization

• XREF: This is the book’s core thesis paragraph — facial neutrality plus unequal starting conditions equaling engineered disparity — linking to the reader’s stated goal of naming race-neutral provisions with race-biased mechanisms.