I am pleased to share this special, and longer than usual, edition of the Tax Justice Network's taxcast. I think the theme, on the link between race and tax, especially important:
In this Taxcast Extra we were honoured to speak with Law Professor Dorothy Brown, whose seminal book has just been released in the United States: ‘The Whiteness of Wealth: how the US tax system impoverishes black Americans — and how we can fix it'.
Let's be clear — when I started writing about race and tax, I was not — my scholarship nor I were welcomed by the white male law professor tax gatekeepers.“
Regular listeners to our long-running monthly podcast the Taxcast will have heard episodes 102 and 103 where we looked at just some of the many complex issues around tax and race in the US and the UK context, the roots of structural racism and the lived experiences of people of colour today as citizens, taxpayers and economic actors. (You can find the Taxcast on most podcast apps or subscribe here by email. It's on Twittertoo).
There are huge research and knowledge gaps in the area of tax and race in many countries. The doors have not been open to work in this area, as Professor Brown explains in our podcast: “Let's be clear — when I started writing about race and tax, I was not — my scholarship nor I were welcomed by the white male law professor tax gatekeepers.”
Researchers have invariably been told that it's a class issue, not a race issue. While of course there are overlaps, as Professor Brown says in this podcast, “in the US, the data has been crystal clear. Black people cannot earn our way out of systemic oppression in the internal revenue code. If there's one takeaway from my book, the whiteness of wealth, that's it!”
The Tax Justice Network has joined up with its sister organisation Tax Justice UK and with the organisation Decolonising Economics, to work with political economist Keval Bharadia to research the UK context — what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know, so we can work together for deep reform. Here's the conversation Keval Bharadia had with Professor Dorothy Brown below. A transcript is available here.
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It’s nice to see another spoke in the wheel of this attempt at laundering racial disparities.
It seems that Ms Brown has done what Picketty did – looked at the tax records!!
Richard – is this factor another ‘joy’ that tax brings – clarity – evidence of society’s ills?
Yes
Good work in this one by Naomi Fowler
It was an enlightening interview.
There is clearly an unseen bias in the UX tax system, which she sees.
Sorry typo … US tax system.