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Camille Walsh. Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 250 pp.
Since the Supreme Court struck down legal segregation with the 1954 Brown decision, many have challenged the de jure/de facto distinction in racial discrimination as an illusion, particularly in terms of the deficit in school resources granted communities of color compared to white communities. The question has been, are the continued disenfranchisement and educational neglect of communities of color the result of inequitable laws and racist structures, or are they the outcome of the prevailing logic of white supremacy and a “natural” inclination toward segregation? From Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1985) to Ansley Erickson's Making the Unequal Metropolis (2016), scholars have illustrated how segregation, in schooling and otherwise, has been the enduring result of economic and other policy choices. While Brown ended legally sanctioned school segregation, this precedent did not signify the end to legally sanctioned policies that have, disproportionally, adversely affected educational opportunity for communities of color. Scholars have shown how housing, economic, and school policies have consistently produced segregation and substantially unequal funding between predominantly white schools and schools with high concentrations of children of color. Moreover, such policies have implicitly reinforced “color-blind” meritocratic tropes that portray people of color as naturally undeserving.
In the latest chapter of this ongoing examination, Camille Walsh interrogates yet another means by which whiteness has been mapped onto the imaginary of citizenship—taxpayer identity. Focusing on the letters of both black and white community members as well as the substantial case law around educational access from Reconstruction to the post-Brown era, Walsh explains how taxpayer identity has been invoked to signify citizenship and to thereby justify access to educational resources. In this work, the author further illustrates,...