A Conversation with Andrew W. Kahrl, Author of "The Black Tax"

Join us in person on DePaul University's Lincoln Park Campus (room TBA) or via Zoom for this event, which will be followed by a Graduate Student Social Hour!

Co-sponsored by DePaul University's School of Public Service, Department of Sociology, International Studies Department, Criminology Department, Department of Geography and GIS, and Critical Ethnic Studies Program

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Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the history of race and inequality in the twentieth-century US, with a focus on housing and real estate, land use and ownership, and local tax systems. He is the author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Harvard UP, 2012), which received the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award; Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018); and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U. Chicago Press, 2024). Kahrl served as the Principal Investigator and co-author of the African American Outdoor Recreation National Historic Landmark Theme Study for the National Park Service. His research and writing appears regularly in media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Boston Review. Kahrl teaches courses on the history of race and real estate in the US, local politics in America, US urban history, Black landownership, and African American history since 1865.

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Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America’s tax regimes.

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. The story of America’s now enormous concentration of wealth at the top—and the equally enormous absence of wealth among most Black households—has its roots here.

Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, and tells, for the first time, the story of Black Americans’ experiences as taxpayers and their fight for a more fair and equitable system for raising and spending the public’s money. This is a history that deepens our understanding of the disadvantages and persistent inequalities that African American households continue to face and reveals hidden engines of economic inequality in America. Detailing the hows and whys of America’s profoundly unequal tax system, The Black Tax equips readers with the knowledge needed to combat inequality and injustice today.

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