Reviewed by: Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973 by Camille Walsh Andrew W. Kahrl (bio) Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973. By Camille Walsh. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 235. $29.95 paper) In this timely and important book, Camille Walsh rightfully situates local tax law, policy, and politics at the center of the struggle for and against educational equality in twentieth-century America. Spanning the period from Reconstruction to the U.S. Supreme [End Page 371] Court's pivotal 1973 decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez, Walsh uses court cases over school funding and access to trace the history of an idea—"taxpayer citizenship"—and its role in enforcing and rationalizing racial disparities in education. In the post-Reconstruction South, racist tropes of Black communities as mere recipients of white taxpayers' dollars became an article of faith among white officials and a cornerstone of the Jim Crow state. This, as Walsh is quick to note and as countless numbers of African Americans at the time argued, was a lie: Blacks consistently paid more than their fair share in taxes. But since the idea fit so nicely within a broader white supremacist worldview, it became a powerful rhetorical device and basis for tax policies that, throughout the era of segregation, not only starved Black communities of school funding but forced Black taxpayers to subsidize white education. Walsh argues that it also advanced the idea that taxes should be equivalent to a payment for service, and that paying taxes is what made a person a citizen. Blacks in the Jim Crow South attempted to use the concept of taxpayer citizenship to their advantage. Walsh recounts instances of Black litigants citing their status as taxpayers when challenging state laws and local practices that effectively denied Black children a public education. But this legal strategy rarely yielded tangible results in court, much less resonance in the white political imagination, where citizenship was synonymous with whiteness and "Black taxpayer" a contradiction in terms. By the early twentieth century, African Americans' mere access to education was beholden to the whims of white parents, whose preferences and objections to Blacks' educational needs invariably held sway in any dispute (the "white veto") even if it meant the total denial of educational opportunities for Black children. Throughout the book, Walsh neatly balances the politics and mechanics of taxation, and shows how white supremacist beliefs, prerogatives, and assumptions determined legal outcomes, informed administrative practices, and in the process, exacerbated racial inequities. Take the practice of separating tax revenues by race, a practice adopted by many southern states, including Kentucky, which not [End Page 372] only allowed white officials to rationalize gross funding disparities, and for myriad other forms of budgetary gimmickry to fly under the radar, but helped to advance the notion that people who paid more in taxes were deserving of more rights and benefits. This idea that taxes should be treated as a fee for services and that white parents, in particular, were entitled to a full return (and nothing less) on their investment in public schools would assume greater significance in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. While the court's unanimous decision stressed the intangible damage racial segregation inflicted on Black children, in retrospect, Walsh's book suggests, the court should have focused more on the tangible benefits school funding structures in American afforded white children, as well as the numerous loopholes it provided white parents seeking to evade integrated schools and hoard resources. The shortcomings and unintended consequences of the Brown decision would become apparent in the decades to come, as middle-class white parents fled to all-white suburbs and school districts, taking their tax dollars with them. As heavily minority school districts suffered for lack of funds, civil rights groups and legal activists challenged the constitutionality of school funding models, which, by relying so heavily on the property tax for revenue, greatly advantaged wealthier communities with substantial tax bases. For a moment, they achieved results in state courts, most notably in the case of Serrano v. Priest, where the California Supreme Court ruled that property-tax...
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Jul 14, 2020
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