New Book Says America Stole $600B From Black Americans In Taxes

A deeply telling new book sheds light on the systemic injustice that has plagued Black Americans for generations. Authored by Andrew W. Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia, “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America” unveils the insidious ways in which U.S. bureaucracies perpetuated the racial wealth gap through discriminatory tax policies. Per Bloomberg, the book reveals how the United States systematically siphoned $600 billion from the Black community through unfair taxes in the aftermath of slavery. Kahrl writes, “This history sheds new light on the forces generating economic inequality in America and the racial character of those inequalities.” Kahrl’s meticulously researched book exposes how municipal and state taxes were weaponized to strip Black Americans of their land ownership and perpetuate cycles of poverty. Drawing on a wealth of statistics, studies, and personal anecdotes, Kahrl chronicles how racist laws and practices, dating back to the Jim Crow era, systematically marginalized Black landowners. One of the book’s chilling examples recounts the plight of Anthony Fleming and J.R. Rooks, Black landowners who were forcibly driven off their farmland by white supremacist mobs. Undeterred, they established the town of Edmonson,...