ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America’s tax regimes.

American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically need its support. Not only do taxpayers with fewer resources—less wealth, power, and land—pay more than the well-off, but they are forced to fight for their rights within an unjust system that undermines any attempts to improve their position or economic standing. In The Black Tax, Andrew W. Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous consequences of inequitable and predatory tax laws in this country—above all, widespread and devastating racial dispossession.

Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans acquired substantial amounts of property nationwide. But racist practices, obscure processes, and outright theft diminished their holdings and their power. Of these, Kahrl shows, few were more powerful, or more quietly destructive, than property taxes. He examines all the structural features and hidden traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less and stripped them of their land and investments, and he reveals the staggering cost. The story of America’s now enormous concentration of wealth at the top—and the equally enormous absence of wealth among most Black households—has its roots here.

Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, and tells, for the first time, the story of Black Americans’ experiences as taxpayers and their fight for a more fair and equitable system for raising and spending the public’s money. This is a history that deepens our understanding of the disadvantages and persistent inequalities that African American households continue to face and reveals hidden engines of economic inequality in America. Detailing the hows and whys of America’s profoundly unequal tax system, The Black Tax equips readers with the knowledge needed to combat inequality and injustice today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Andrew W. Kahrl is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of the books The Land Was Ours and Free the Beaches.

REVIEWS

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of The Black Tax. It is quite clearly one of the most important books of our time, bringing out into the open the shocking story of how the tax system has functioned in the past and continues today to be a key generator of racial injustice and inequality.”

— George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

“The Black Tax is a meticulously researched gem that explores state and local tax policy as one of the root causes of the Black-white wealth gap. It chronicles the bravery of Black Americans who fought back against their treatment as second-class citizens while paying first-class taxes. After you read The Black Tax, you will never view tax policy debates the same way.”

— Dorothy Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth

“The Black Tax changes forever how we will talk about property, racism, and the public's money. Kahrl’s timely book makes the complex political implications of unjust taxation simple and plain: Black people have been overpaying for America’s democracy. Reparations, long overdue, would merely be a refund.”

— N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete

“A groundbreaking, revelatory account, The Black Tax shows how African American homeowners have been taxed differently than their white counterparts since the end of Reconstruction. This is a powerful book about race-based wealth redistribution and resistance, one that documents the systematic theft of Black tax revenues and property in a way that shatters long-standing American myths about the promise of homeownership.”

— William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

“The Black Tax is a brilliant, sweeping, and damning investigation of the racist structures of local taxation that resulted in the legal theft of hundreds of billions in wealth and property from Black Americans over a century and a half. Kahrl’s book follows the money—from the Jim Crow South to the segregated urban North, from civil rights protests to Wall Street profiteering—to reveal how the exploitation of Black homeowners has long subsidized white communities and how this predatory system of racial capitalism continues today.”

— Matt Lassiter, author of The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs

“Compelling. . . . [The Black Tax] painstakingly outlines how bureaucracies in the US cemented the country’s racial wealth gap through a framework of aggressively unfair municipal and state taxes.”

— Bloomberg

"Unveils the insidious ways in which U.S. bureaucracies perpetuated the racial wealth gap through discriminatory tax policies. . . . [A] blinding eye opener to America’s history of racial injustice and a call to action for meaningful restitution."

— Atlanta Daily World

[Unravels] how the U.S. stole $600 billion from Black Americans. . . . Pairs personal stories with rich details about municipalities nationwide that used complex tax collection to fund distribution to white land and property owners, and the economic dynamics spanning over a century of U.S. history."

— Black Enterprise

"An ambitious and powerful book, a sweeping and damning indictment of structural racism in the tax system. . . . The Black Tax will be read as the definitive refutation of one of white supremacy’s most potent falsehoods—the lie that white American taxpayers subsidize undeserving Black people."

— Democracy Journal

"Kahrl uses a range of aggregated data to make his case against local property taxes (or at least against the way those levies are often administered and enforced). But he also has an eye for humanizing anecdotes — a vital skill when trying to explain taxes to a nontechnical audience. The Black Tax tells the story of property taxation from a bottom-up perspective; while Kahrl doesn’t neglect the sort of top-down view that shapes most historical work on policy formulation, he puts individual taxpayers at the center of his narrative."

— Joseph Thorndike, Forbes

"The Black Tax dives deeply and methodically into racial discrimination in local property tax administration in the United States. It has excellent synergy with other books that explore racially discriminatory policies in income taxation, social welfare, and agriculture and can be viewed as a detailed look at one specific tactic among a menu of tactics that were used to dispossess Black landowners of their property over the course of the twentieth century."

— Journal of Economic Literature

"Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book. . . With The Black Tax, we now have a fuller picture of homeownership for racialized minorities."

— Modern American History

"Illuminating and maddening. . . Kahrl’s book zeros in on local tax systems, which pay for education, clean water, sewage, public safety, and other public goods and services. . . . Again and again, Kahrl writes of how the white parts of town got water and sewage lines, paved streets, sidewalks and electricity while the Black parts went without. . . . And Kahrl warns that these taxation practices aren’t just some dusty old history."

— Style Weekly

"The Black Tax is a meticulously well-researched and documented presentation about societal transgressions against Blacks that demonstrates the gross fiscal repercussions on their rights and ability to accumulate wealth."

— Public Finance Journal

"[An] extraordinary new book. . . . One cannot read [The Black Tax] without feeling as though something deeply hidden has been profoundly revealed."

— The Journal of American History

TABLE OF CONTENTS