With things around the country starting to resemble something normal, many employers are calling workers back into the office, and after many months of working from home, many aren't so eager to go back, including our first caller.
For our second call we do some short and long-term planning with a couple in their 30s who are about to welcome their second child.
Our guest in hour two, Dorothy A. Brown, became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors.
Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why.
In her recently released book, The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed.
She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind.
From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers.
The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream.
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"Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com.