We Can’t Fix Our Economy Without Confronting White Supremacy

[HoosierRadical]

Regardless of when the president and Congress decide to end their current budget standoff, it is increasingly clear that the emerging deal will do very little to reverse the fiscal wrongs at the heart of the tax code. These wrongs have transformed America’s economy into the least equitable and most racially unfair it’s been in almost a half century.

Our collective denial over the fundamental injustice at the heart of our economic system is a result of white supremacy. The words “white supremacy” are radioactive to be sure. It pains me to write them. However, as a trained economist I go where the facts lead me. Since I have written potentially inflammatory words, let me be clear about what I mean.

White supremacy is a low-level assumption about characteristics that white people allegedly have which transforms inequality between them and everyone else into something natural. It often masks itself as fairness and goes unquestioned as a result. Using this definition, our current tax code is a work of white supremacy.

The fact that we’ve arrived at this point on the watch of the country’s first black president is an irony too large to ignore. Mostly victim, partly complicit, Obama is not fully to blame. Yet, economically speaking, the stubborn fact remains that the country is at a moment of racial injustice not seen in more than a generation. In the last four years, that injustice has only expanded and calcified.

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/12/we_cant_fix_our_economy_without_confronting_white_supremacy.html

[LARED]

1. Is Mr. Jones proposing

a tax code based on one's race?

White wealth is double what it was 30 years ago. Black and Latino wealth is at its lowest point ever recorded. These inequitable consequences flow directly from political choices embedded in our tax code. But since 1980 when these choices began to be implemented, we’ve talked ourselves out of race and into a mess when it comes to taxes. In fact the frame for our current fiscal debate has clear white supremacist roots.

The article is almost unreadable.

[HoosierRadical]

2. Nowhere in the article does it even remotely

suggest something like that. Your reply is unfortunate.

[LARED]

3. Maybe you can help me.

What is the article proposing?

Mr. Jones claims that white supremacy is built into the tax code. (although he never clearly articulates how or why)

The tax code is race neutral. It is income biased in favor of low income people, so I can't really figure out what Mr. Jones is getting at.