Taxation without Representation

Malik Miah

The Black Tax:
150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
By Andrew W. Kahrl
University of Chicago Press, 2024, 456 pages, $20 paperback.

ANDREW W. KAHRL, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, has authored a valuable book that is important for understanding the relationship between national oppression and white supremacy. That relationship is a key to how the billionaire class dominates the working class in the United States.

The author asks: “Why has racial equality remained such an enduring problem in America, and what forces fuel its persistence?”

The book opens with three stories of Black working-class homeowners in Long Island, New York and how they were treated by the realtor, banking and tax system of entrenched racial discrimination.

In one case, a Black woman bought a $50,000 modest two-bedroom home in Roosevelt, New York, in the late 1970s with a $200 per month tax payment. The property tax was the same as a wealthier white homeowner in a neighborhood who bought a $200,000 home.

In a second example, a Black working mother in 1984 paid $35,000 for a Long Island home. She paid a higher tax than homeowners predominantly white communities.

A third example is a working-class Black woman who bought a $10,000 home in Hempstead, Long Island. When she went to sell the home, she discovered she no longer owned her home — she was unaware of an unpaid debt that she never saw.

A lien had been placed on the property. The home was sold in a tax lien auction. Tax liens by banks or private contractors are a common trick to take away property from working-class people.

Behind Legal Property Theft

While legal segregation in the South that took shape after the defeat of Reconstruction in the late 19th century is easy to understand — and only ended with the victory of the civil rights movement in the 1960s — the less open de facto segregation (for example, in real estate) across the North and West was just as damaging for Black people.

The author shows the role of tax laws and housing and real estate discrimination in how Black wealth was denied, and Black people ghettoized. There were large areas in major cities and suburbs where African Americans could not buy homes or if they did, faced white neighbors’ backlash.

Kahrl points to “the legacy of housing policies and real estate industry practices that powered the growth of the white middle class and white household wealth-building in mid-20th century America while simultaneously constraining Black mobility, deepening racial segregation, and subjecting Black Americans to numerous and devastating forms of economic predation and plunder.”

This is important to understand. Integral racial and national oppression of Blacks has been to build the white supremacist capitalist state.

Of course, the ruling-class reason is simple: keep white people onside by convincing them they are better than Black people. Why else wouldn’t poor white working-class people see Black workers as natural allies?

Full Dynamics of Racial Oppression

The book includes five parts: Part I: Jim Crow’s Fiscal Order; Part II: Black in the Metropolis; Part III: A Local Struggle; Part IV: Age of Results; Part V: Neoliberalism at Home.

In his Conclusion Kahrl writes about a 2022 situation in the majority Black city of Jackson, the Mississippi capital, where the water system shut down due to a lack of resources, and the school system in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

“In both cases, the majority- Black city and school district lacked the resources needed to make the necessary repairs and upgrades on their own.

“Over the previous four decades, Jackson’s local tax base had shrunk 20 percent, as first whites and then middle-class Blacks fled to surrounding suburbs.

“During that time, succession of Republican governors and state legislatures slashed taxes on the state’s businesses and highest owners, raised taxes on the state’s poor, and starved the state capital and its 82 percent Black population of revenue.”

In short, even after the end of Jim Crow and other forms of legal segregation in real estate and banking, the Black population except a minority of upper income earners are as poor or worse off than ever.

Class exploitation, which is not new, is worse for all working people but doubly so for African Americans. As throughout U.S. history, they are forced to pay higher taxes for less, and last hired and first fired in most jobs, including in the professions.

Counterrevolution and Fightback

Worse, the rollback of the civil rights gains after the 1960s has been fiercely attacked and undermined ever since the John Roberts-run Supreme Court took power in 2005. Trump and Roberts are joined together in accelerating the imposition of an authoritarian and racist state.

Black freedom fighters for much of U.S. history have fought on their own. Black Marxists, however, have joined both independent Black organizations and multinational revolutionary groups Kahrl knowing that to win a socialist revolution requires a unified revolutionary socialist movement of all ethnic groups.

Reforming the capitalist system, as the last half century has shown, cannot end racial oppression. Only mass upsurge against the capitalist class, led by Black and white working-class unity, can bring radical change. Unless the “race issue” is understood, and how a minority population leadership is key to a successful revolution, the freedom struggle will not succeed.

The Black Tax illustrates the connection between Black national oppression and the construction of a powerful capitalist state, where Blacks have been treated as second-class citizens in the best of times but generally worse.

Kahrl’s book should help all readers better understand the combined race and class dynamics of political and social struggles.

January-February 2026, ATC 240