The Review of Black Political Economy has published the online version of Guilford College Sulon Bibb Stedman Professor of Economics Bob Williams’s article entitled, “Federal Wealth Policy and the Perpetuation of White Supremacy”. The paper version is slated for the summer.
The article examines a dozen contemporary tax deductions that selectively favor wealthy households and thereby widen the nation’s wealth gap, itself a pervasive legacy of a racialized past.
The article places these current tax deductions in historical context as it links them to past wealth-building policies including enslavement, land theft, homestead acts, and the G.I. Bill that benefited Whites at the expense of Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native Americans.
Bob is currently working on a project to expand this topic into a book on stratification economics.
Generous funding by the Faculty Development Committee and the Kenan Faculty Development Funds provided crucial support for this paper.