Andrew W. Kahrl

media release:  Join A Room of One's Own for a reading and discussion of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America by Professor Andrew W. Kahrl in conversation with award winning author and professor Simon Balto.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.

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. If you want to understand the extreme economic disadvantages and persistent racial inequalities that African American households continue to face, there is no better starting point than The Black Tax.

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.

Simon Balto is an assistant professor of history and College of Letters and Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of the multi-award-winning Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).