Book talk with Andrew W. Kahrl to focus on discrimination and property taxes

New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville will host a book talk with author and UVA professor Andrew W. Kahrl on Friday, April 12, at 7 p.m.

Kahrl will be speaking about his new nonfiction book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, which will be released from the University of Chicago Press this month.

This in-person event is co-sponsored by the Karsh Institute of Democracy and will be free and open to the public.

In The Black Tax, Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous consequences of inequitable and predatory tax laws in this country – above all, widespread and devastating racial dispossession.

Throughout the 20th century, African Americans acquired substantial amounts of property nationwide. But racist practices, obscure processes, and outright theft diminished their holdings and their power. Of these, Kahrl shows, few were more powerful, or more quietly destructive, than property taxes.

He examines all the structural features and hidden traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less and stripped them of their land and investments, and he reveals the staggering cost.

Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, describing how discrimination continues to take new forms, even as people continue to fight for their rights, their assets and their power.

If you want to understand the extreme economic disadvantages and persistent racial inequalities that African American households continue to face, there is no better starting point than The Black Tax.

Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in the history of race and inequality in real estate and local tax systems in the US.

His previous books include The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (UNC, 2012), which received the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, and Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale, 2018).

He also writes regularly for popular publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Boston Review.

New Dominion Bookshop is located at 404 E. Main St. on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.

For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.