In a racialized social system, racial slurs and stereotypes applied to whites by nonwhites do not carry the same meanings or outcomes as they do when these roles are swapped. That is, racial epithets directed toward whites are unlikely to affect their life chances in the same way that racial epithets directed toward minorities do. Our central question in this paper is in what ways are epithets and stereotypes racially unequal? To answer this question, we rely upon a case study to drive our analysis. We argue that the symbolic meanings and outcomes of epithets and stereotypes matter because they maintain white supremacy in both material and symbolic ways. Thus, they serve as resources that impose, confer, deny, and approve other capital rewards in everyday interactions that ultimately exclude racial minorities, blacks and Latinas/os in particular, from opportunities and resources while preserving white supremacy.
How typical is Ferguson? That is, to what extent is monetary punishment driven by fiscal crisis and deficit spending? Do communities that increasingly rely less on property taxes generate higher rates of fines and fees? And how might increased spending on policing over time impact whether local governments turn to these sanctions for revenue? We compile city-and county-level information from four national data sets to answer these questions through a series of least squares regression models. Our findings add to what sociologists, criminologists, and policymakers know about monetary punishment in at least three ways. First, we offer an analysis that focuses on monetary sanctions for not only criminal but civil courts. Second, our focus broadens the scope of local case studies that emphasize questions of process. And third, our study furthers the project of the New Fiscal Sociology. Throughout, we stress how public finance formalizes inequality in ways that define the symbolic relations between groups, their relation to the state, and the unspoken social contract. Our discussion concludes with some policy recommendations.
The relationship between taxation and structural racism is both understudied and undertheorized. Our article introducing the following symposium is a starting point to address this gap, proposing that “a racial tax state” structures the US tax system. Grounded by contemporary race theory, we show how this seemingly innocuous and bureaucratic procedure is structured by and reproduces racial inequality. Far from a neutral and even-keeled practice, taxation is a political tool imbued with stereotypes, values, and emotions to carry out and justify acts of taking. To suggest future directions for this area of research, we propose five initial mechanisms the racial tax state deploys to codify racialized inequalities of socially-defined rewards and penalties: enfranchisement, hoarding, abatement, extraction, and redistribution. We provide both historical and contemporary examples of these mechanisms, drawing especially on the symposium’s contributors, to show patterns in tax contestation and restructuring at moments in which racial justice seemed possible.
Chicago’s largest racial and ethnic groups—blacks, Latinxs, and whites—each makes up roughly one-third of the city’s population. As this report reveals, these groups generally live in separate neighborhoods and have divergent experiences when it comes to housing, economics, education, justice, and health. Capturing life in Chicago today isin many ways a tale of three cities.
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