Podcast: ‘The Whiteness of Wealth,’ a conversation with Professor Dorothy Brown

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 Twitter too).

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.

The image “Locked out of King’s Institute” by Ravages is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0