Lexington Books
Pages: 240
•
Trim: 6 1/4 x 9 1/2
978-1-4985-0365-5 • Hardback • June 2015 • $104.00 • (£70.00)
978-1-4985-0367-9 • Paperback • November 2016 • $44.99 • (£29.95)
978-1-4985-0366-2 • eBook • June 2015 • $42.50 • (£29.95)
Andre L. Smith is associate professor at the Widener University School of Law
Chapter One: Does it Matter What Slaves Thought Direct Tax Meant in the US Constitution
Chapter Two: PreColonial African Tax Experiences
Chapter Three: Tax and the Rise of White Supremacy in the US
Chapter Four: No Reparations Without Taxation
Chapter Five: Tax and the Demise of White Supremacy in the United States
Chapter Six: Critical Race Tax Theory in the 21st Century
One institution hardly ever comes to mind when talk turns to institutional racism: our tax system. Most of us simply do not think about racism when we think about taxes. Andre Smith does. Smith . . . has a timely new book out — Essays on the Relationship Between Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice: Black Tax — that just may redefine what we mean by institutional racism.
— Too Much
Andre Smith uses an argument for contextualism as the starting point for a wide-ranging meditation on the centrality of race to taxes, presenting a sustained argument for a more contextualized interpretation of the federal tax code in opposition to the now-dominant textualism. He takes us from the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, where the debate over interpretative methods is raging back to the founding of the country, where he argues that enslaved people had ideas about what direct tax meant, then even further back to ancient Africa, where he explores the centrality of tax to the administration of African kingdoms. He ranges forward to slavery and Jim Crow, showing the many ways that the tax system generated revenue for the state and federal governments off of the labor of people of African descent. Andre Smith has produced a book about the history of taxation as an instrument of white supremacy and he has carried the story down to the present. If you're interested in African American history or in tax this book will open your eyes to important and forgotten parts of our nation's history and where to go now.
— Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tax and Racial Economic Justice surveys the writings of the past twenty years, adds fresh analysis and puts the lie once and for all to the claim that United States taxation is a race neutral enterprise. A must read for those interested in racial and economic justice.
— Beverly Moran, Vanderbilt University
How is white racial domination perpetuated, and how can it be ended? For the layperson, the tax system would probably not jump to mind as a prime candidate for either function. Yet in this highly illuminating text, Andre Smith demonstrates the crucial role unfair taxation practices have played from the American colonial period onward in establishing and maintaining white Americans’ illicit material advantage. Anyone interested in racial economic justice needs to acquaint themselves with the less visible but deeply entrenched and effective mechanisms of unjust racial wealth transfer examined in this book.
— Charles W. Mills, CUNY Graduate Center