The marriage bonus rewards single-earner households that black couples rarely form

Evidence

However, even before the tax rolls were expanded in the postwar era, it was clear that the marriage bonus was likely to disproportionately benefit white couples. Black wives, like my mother, have always worked outside the home more than white wives, even after controlling for income. In fact, even as income rises, the labor gap between white and black wives widens along with it—meaning that among the highest-earning couples, more black wives work and more white wives do not. (No matter how high the husband’s income is, black wives are more likely to contribute significant amounts to household income than white wives.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Directly carries the book’s central template from chapter 1: a facially race-neutral rule whose disparate impact follows mechanically from unequal starting conditions (Black women’s higher workforce participation). Knits onto the reader’s ‘structural racism as mechanism’ frame.
• SEED: The counterintuitive datum — that the white/Black spousal-labor gap widens at higher incomes — is a sharp standalone hook: the tax penalty bites hardest on precisely the affluent Black couples where the reader might least expect it.