“Compelling. . . . [The Black Tax] painstakingly outlines how bureaucracies in the US cemented the country’s racial wealth gap through a framework of aggressively unfair municipal and state taxes.”

Bloomberg

[Unravels] how the U.S. stole $600 billion from Black Americans. . . . Pairs personal stories with rich details about municipalities nationwide that used complex tax collection to fund distribution to white land and property owners, and the economic dynamics spanning over a century of U.S. history."

Black Enterprise

"Unveils the insidious ways in which U.S. bureaucracies perpetuated the racial wealth gap through discriminatory tax policies. . . . [A] blinding eye opener to America’s history of racial injustice and a call to action for meaningful restitution."

Atlanta Daily World

"An ambitious and powerful book, a sweeping and damning indictment of structural racism in the tax system. . . . The Black Tax will be read as the definitive refutation of one of white supremacy’s most potent falsehoods—the lie that white American taxpayers subsidize undeserving Black people."

Democracy Journal

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of The Black Tax. It is quite clearly one of the most important books of our time, bringing out into the open the shocking story of how the tax system has functioned in the past and continues today to be a key generator of racial injustice and inequality.”

George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

“The Black Tax is a meticulously researched gem that explores state and local tax policy as one of the root causes of the Black-white wealth gap. It chronicles the bravery of Black Americans who fought back against their treatment as second-class citizens while paying first-class taxes. After you read The Black Tax, you will never view tax policy debates the same way.”

Dorothy Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth

“The Black Tax changes forever how we will talk about property, racism, and the public's money. Kahrl’s timely book makes the complex political implications of unjust taxation simple and plain: Black people have been overpaying for America’s democracy. Reparations, long overdue, would merely be a refund.”

N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete

“A groundbreaking, revelatory account, The Black Tax shows how African American homeowners have been taxed differently than their white counterparts since the end of Reconstruction. This is a powerful book about race-based wealth redistribution and resistance, one that documents the systematic theft of Black tax revenues and property in a way that shatters long-standing American myths about the promise of homeownership.”

William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

“The Black Tax is a brilliant, sweeping, and damning investigation of the racist structures of local taxation that resulted in the legal theft of hundreds of billions in wealth and property from Black Americans over a century and a half. Kahrl’s book follows the money—from the Jim Crow South to the segregated urban North, from civil rights protests to Wall Street profiteering—to reveal how the exploitation of Black homeowners has long subsidized white communities and how this predatory system of racial capitalism continues today.”

Matt Lassiter, author of The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs