When African-American history is done well, it allows us to see the places where inequality hides. Scholars in the areas of the history of capitalism, African-American history, and urban studies have popularized the language of historical phenomena such as white flight, redlining, and privatization, in the process of explaining the origins of contemporary challenges. A reasonably educated person understands that deindustrialization at mid-century led to job losses. Every May, pundits write essays about the failure to equalize schools as the nation memorializes the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Popular journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones owe their careers to their study of historical work in order to leverage public-facing conversations from reparations for slavery to the politicization of the teaching of civil rights. Essentially, good history helps us search for the state practices and policies that soften the blow of inequality, assault human dignity, and normalize poverty. In his deeply researched and thoughtfully written book The Black Tax, Andrew Kahrl addresses another obscure mechanism that has historically worked to dispossess and disadvantage African Americans across regions and generations, and has ensnarled both landowners and tenants. Kahrl's book forces readers and scholars to think about the ways that a lack of federal authority and will to protect Black citizens allowed states and municipalities to assess, tax, and place liens on Black property—from vacant plots to farm land to family homes.

Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is a sweeping and insightful history of the local property tax in the United States from Reconstruction onward that speaks eloquently to urban history, tax history, and histories of capitalism and race in the United States. Kahrl exposes the relentless process of dispossession and exploitation, captive taxpayers and fiscal apartheid within the local property tax that has overtaxed Black Americans by over $275 billion, cost $326 billion in land loss, and created a generational wealth difference compounded into trillions. But Kahrl is not focused only on individual loss or even community dispossession, but on entrenched systems of legalized theft built into the local property tax that have reinforced themselves over time through the most localized bureaucratic subjectivity and bias, such that poor cities are now left with few fiscally sustaining options other than preying on their poorest citizens.

Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

Whether by reevaluating previously underappreciated factors or by uncovering new source material, historical scholarship occasionally makes immediate and simultaneous interventions in both academic and public-facing conversations.1 Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is one such work, and actually accomplishes these two tasks admirably. In the last two decades, scholars have investigated African American ownership of real property in land and homes, as well as the ways that governmental and private actors, policies, and practices have impaired Black people's ability to acquire and accumulate wealth in this country.2 This body of scholarship, alongside the work of public intellectuals, has served to jumpstart discussion around the issue of reparations.3 Prior to the release of Kahrl's illustrious book, however, no one had identified property taxes as lying at the very center of race-based structural inequality.4

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.