Why it matters that race and ethnicity aren’t recorded by the IRS
The lack of race data obscures the ways in which tax collection favors white people. (Unsplash/)If we want to dismantle institutional racism, we need to look back. In the case of the tax code, we need to go more than a century back. Historically, race and ethnicity have not been reported to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with other taxation-relevant data like household size and composition. Understanding why this is can illuminate some of the far-reaching consequences of institutional racism. Many government agencies collect racial data. An easy example is the U.S. Census which has been gathering this information since 1790. And there’s a strong argument for gathering this demographic information, since doing so can reveal statistical disparities between racial groups. Despite this, other government entities that collect data on a national scale don’t require this information at all.“Our income tax forms, since they were first used in 1913, [did] not...