The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix ItPaperback (2024)

The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix ItPaperback (1)

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  • Description
  • Product Details
  • About the Author
  • Read an Excerpt
  • Table of Contents

Description

A groundbreaking exposé of racism in the American taxation system from a law professor and expert on tax policy

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND FORTUNE • “Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and what a more equitable future might look like.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist

Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why.

In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed. She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream.

Solving the problem will require a wholesale rethinking of America’s tax code. But it will also require both black and white Americans to make different choices. This urgent, actionable book points the way forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780525577331

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Publication Date: 03-22-2022

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Dorothy A. Brown is an Asa Griggs Candler Professor at Emory University School of Law. A graduate of Fordham University and Georgetown Law, she received her LLM in Taxation from New York University. A nationally recognized scholar in the areas of race, class, and tax policy, she has published dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on the topic. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR, and her opinion pieces have been published in CNN Opinion, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Born and raised in the South Bronx in New York City, Dorothy Brown currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

One

Married While Black

Most Americans believe that getting married means paying lower taxes. And one thing my parents could have used was a tax cut. When Mommy and Daddy got married in 1956, they didn’t have money for a fancy wedding reception or a honeymoon; my mother made the potato salad they served to their guests, and they wouldn’t take a vacation together until decades later. Money was so tight that after a couple of months of paying $25 per week for their own apartment, they moved into the spare room in my paternal grandmother’s—Grandma Bertha’s—apartment. (You can imagine how much fun that was for a couple of newlyweds.) And they stayed there after my sister and I were born, because they simply didn’t have the resources to leave.

Like most couples, my parents started filing their tax returns jointly the year after they got married. When I was young they used a tax preparer, but later they happily handed over the responsibility to me. Even with all that education, I assumed that filing jointly was the best thing for my parents, since filing separately was likely to result in fewer tax breaks. Nearly 95 percent of all married couples file jointly, and those who don’t typically choose to file separately to avoid liability for a spouse’s potential tax problems. (A well-known example is the late senator John McCain, and his wife, Cindy, who inherited ownership of the third-largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in the country. Before they got married, they signed a prenuptial agreement that included a requirement that they would file separate tax returns.)

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.

Meet Henry and Charlotte Seaborn, the rich, white society couple whose lawsuit led the Supreme Court to establish the joint tax return in 1948. Henry and Charlotte were married in 1902, before we even had a progressive income tax system. As noted in the introduction, when that system was enacted in 1913, taxpayers were required to file as individuals. That meant the same rate schedule applied whether you were married or single. There were different exemption amounts for individuals and married couples—$3,000 versus $4,000, on the grounds that it cost less to maintain one household for two people, than two separate households—which had the potential to provide a small tax cut when you got married. In 1913, however, only 1 percent of Americans had income high enough to have to pay taxes. By 1930, exemption amounts had been lowered, requiring around 5 percent of Americans to file tax returns, including Henry and Charlotte, respectively the vice president of the Skinner & Eddy shipbuilding company and his socialite stay-at-home spouse.

According to court records, in 1927 Henry had taxable income of just under $38,500 (about $500,000 today, adjusted for inflation). More than half of that income came from investments. (That’s a whole other piece of tax policy, but we’ll get to that in chapter 5.) The exemption amount, which had been $20,000 in 1913, had been lowered to $2,000 in 1917—which meant not only did Henry have to pay taxes, but he had to pay a lot in taxes. By 1927, the Seaborns were fed up. They decided to use their considerable resources to reduce their tax bills—and succeeded, with a little help from the United States Supreme Court. The Seaborns lived in Washington, a “community property” state, which gave Charlotte equal legal ownership of whatever income her husband received during their marriage. When they filed their taxes for 1927, Charlotte put half of Henry’s income (and expenses) on her tax return, and Henry did the same. The married exemption was $3,500 that year, and the Seaborns each decided to take half of it—$1,750 each.

Here’s how this worked, in practice—and for simplicity, let’s count only Henry’s wage income, not his investments. So Henry has income of $15,000, and Charlotte has none. If he’d obeyed the law, as a married taxpayer filing a joint return, he would subtract the personal exemption of $3,500 and have taxable income of $11,500. That would result in a $370 tax bill—roughly $5,400 in today’s dollars. His marginal tax rate was 6 percent—the highest rate his last dollars of income were taxed at.

Henry, however, chose not to obey the law, and allocated half his income to Charlotte for tax purposes. Each spouse thus reported net income of $7,500—and because there was no option for a person with no income, like Charlotte, to file a return, the Seaborns invented one, and deducted half of the married exemption from each income. That would put their taxable income at $5,750 each, with a resulting tax bill of $112.50 for each Seaborn. Under this scenario, their highest marginal tax rate was only 3 percent.

Henry and Charlotte might have been charged with tax fraud, but their “ingenuity” was rewarded. When the IRS initially audited the Seaborns’ tax returns and rejected them, arguing that all of the income (and expenses) should have been included on Henry’s tax return because he was the sole wage earner and sole owner of the investments, Henry paid the extra taxes ($703.01, roughly $10,000 today) and then sued for a refund so that he could take his case to federal district court. With the help of Donworth, Todd & Holman (the precursor of Perkins Coie LLP, currently the largest law firm in the Pacific Northwest), the Seaborns won—first at the district court, and then, after another appeal from the IRS, at the Supreme Court. They were able to split Henry’s income, using their wealth to get a permanent tax cut that would enable them to accumulate even more wealth.

In doing so, the Seaborns not only set a precedent for helping rich couples in community property states pay less tax but also made other wealthy Americans aware of the potential to change the laws in their favor. Initially, only couples in community property states, like Washington, could benefit from marital income splitting; in most states, income earned during the marriage belonged to the spouse who earned it. Before Poe v. Seaborn, the 5 percenters who lived in separate property states had tried to find another way of reducing their tax burden, splitting their income by entering into contracts where the sole wage earner (the husband) transferred a half interest in his income and other property to his wife. That case, too, had gone all the way to the Supreme Court; unlike in Poe v. Seaborn, the rich white married couple lost. The Supreme Court reasoned that in separate property states, “he who earns” the income is the one who will be taxed on it.

The Supreme Court thus created a situation where married couples with identical income and expenses but who lived in different states would pay different federal income tax bills. However, this was a violation of the horizontal equity principle underpinning the progressive tax system—and still only the 5 percent wealthiest Americans were paying in. They were determined to make a change.

One approach was for husbands and wives to form family partnerships and “split” their incomes equally. Family partnerships mimicked small businesses, such as two-person law firms or retail stores; these are classified as “pass-through” entities in which each individual partner pays taxes on their share of the income. (The spousal approach ignored the fact that no legitimate business partnership agreement would be formed solely to award half of the income from the earner to the nonearner.) When family partnerships weren’t challenged by the IRS, the couple got the same result as the Seaborns, and a lower tax bill. When they were challenged, sometimes the taxpayer won and sometimes they lost. This approach was case by case, expensive, and unpredictable.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 Married While Black 29

2 Black House/White Market 64

3 The Great Un-Equalizer 96

4 The Best Jobs 132

5 Legacy 166

6 What's Next? 200

Author's Note and Acknowledgments 227

Notes 231

Index 267

The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--and How We Can Fix ItPaperback (2024)

FAQs

How can we improve racial wealth gap? ›

Five specific suggestions to close the racial wealth gap are:
  1. Make homeownership tax subsidies more progressive. ...
  2. Promote retirement savings through automatic individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and.
  3. Reauthorize the Assets for Independence program. ...
  4. Increase access to high-quality education for low-wealth families.

Who wrote The Whiteness of Wealth? ›

Brown on the whiteness of wealth.

What is the cause of the black white wealth gap? ›

Systemic inequities and barriers keep people of color from achieving economic security through employment, education, and homeownership, resulting in racial disparities in wealth and income. These disparities are the consequence of ongoing discrimination, structural inequality, and biases across our institutions.

What is the answer to closing the racial wealth gap? ›

Closing the racial wealth gap requires addressing systemic and structural issues such as discriminatory policies, unequal access to education and job opportunities, and systemic racism.

Who wrote Playing in the Dark Whiteness and the Literary Imagination? ›

Among Toni Morrison's best-known works are the novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987) and the nonfiction volumes Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Remember (2004).

Who wrote the wealth of all nations? ›

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, probably the most influential book on market economics ever written. Born in 1723, Adam Smith was the son of a customs official in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.

Who wrote the grapes of wealth? ›

The Grapes of Wrath, the best-known novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1939. It evokes the harshness of the Great Depression and arouses sympathy for the struggles of migrant farmworkers.

How can we stop unequal distribution of wealth? ›

Income inequality can be reduced directly by decreasing the incomes of the richest or by increasing the incomes of the poorest. Policies focusing on the latter include increasing employment or wages and transferring income.

How can the government reduce the wealth gap? ›

Governments can reduce inequality through tax relief and income support or transfers (government programs like welfare, free health care, and food stamps), among other types of policies.

How can we overcome the gap between rich and poor? ›

Public education: Increasing the supply of skilled labor and reducing income inequality due to education differentials. Progressive taxation: The rich are taxed proportionally more than the poor, reducing the amount of income inequality in society. Minimum wage legislation: Raising the income of the poorest workers.

How to bridge the income gap? ›

The solutions in this report include:
  1. Baby Bonds.
  2. Guarantee Employment and Significantly Raise the Minimum Wage.
  3. Invest in Affordable Housing.
  4. Medicare for All.
  5. Postal Banking.
  6. Significantly Raise Taxes on the Ultra-Wealthy.
  7. Turn Upside-Down Tax Expenditures Right-Side Up.
  8. Congressional Committee on Reparations.

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