Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice

Black Tax

Andre L. Smith

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

Lexington Books

Pages: 258 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4985-0365-5 • Hardback • June 2015 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-4985-0367-9 • Paperback • November 2016 • $51.99 • (£40.00)

978-1-4985-0366-2 • eBook • June 2015 • $49.00 • (£38.00)

Subjects: Law / Taxation, History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), Law / Constitutional, Political Science / American Government / General, Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy, Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice

Black Tax

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 258 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-4985-0365-5 • Hardback • June 2015 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-4985-0367-9 • Paperback • November 2016 • $51.99 • (£40.00)

978-1-4985-0366-2 • eBook • June 2015 • $49.00 • (£38.00)

Subjects: Law / Taxation, History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), Law / Constitutional, Political Science / American Government / General, Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy, Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

Author

Andre L. Smith is associate professor at the Widener University School of Law

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

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

Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice

Black Tax

Andre L. Smith

Tax Law and Racial Economic Justice

Black Tax

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