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White Backlash, the 'Taxpaying' Public, and Educational Citizenship

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White Backlash, the 'Taxpaying' Public, and Educational Citizenship CRS0010.1177/0896920516645657Critical SociologyWalsh 645657research-article2016 Article Critical Sociology 2017, Vol. 43(2) 237 –247 White Backlash, the © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: ‘Taxpaying’ Public, and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920516645657DOI: 10.1177/0896920516645657 Educational Citizenship journals.sagepub.com/home/crs Camille Walsh University of Washington Bothell, USA Abstract This article argues that well before the taxpayer revolts of the 1970s, taxpayer identity was a consciously privileged claim that both obscured class divisions among whites and elevated those racialized groups presumed to have higher taxable income to a higher position in claiming citizenship rights. The paper examines hundreds of letters to the Supreme Court defending racial segregation in the wake of the Brown decision from 1954 to 1970, a third of which deployed the purportedly ‘neutral’ language of taxpayer status to argue for the maintenance of the structure of white supremacy and inequality in educational access and resources. In this ‘marketplace of citizenship,’ whiteness was automatically presumed to imply ‘taxpayer,’ a category which was then deployed to claim educational entitlement for white children. Meanwhile, ‘nontaxpayer’ was consistently racialized – regardless of actually taxpaying levels – and treated as a justification for inequality. This article argues that the very question of who can claim an identity as a ‘taxpayer’ (and why they may choose to) is deeply historically racialized and serves to construct people of color as outside the burdens and benefits of citizenship as well as ensuring that the poor more broadly are perpetually insecure in their access to rights claims. Keywords black history, critical legal studies, education, New Right, race and ethnicity, social history Introduction Two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Aura Lee, a resident of Harlem, wrote to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to demand access to white-only schools for poor white taxpayers. Lee closed her letter by demanding that Black agree ‘that poor white taxpayers are entitled to enjoy some all-white places, if they so desire’ (Lee, 1956). As Lee’s letter indicates, a common refrain of the hundreds of unsolicited letters defending educa- tional segregation received by the Supreme Court in the post-Brown era was that the writers were Corresponding author: Camille Walsh, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell, Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA, 98011, USA. Email: [email protected] 238 Critical Sociology 43(2) taxpayers, and had a legal and racial right as ‘taxpaying citizens’ to a certain kind of education. Taxpayer citizenship claims like this reinforced a public identity that united low-income white resentment, racial privilege, and assumptions about a hierarchy of ‘taxpayers’ that mapped onto a framework of segregated and unequal education. This article argues that the notion of the ‘publics’ that were presumed to participate in and ben- efit from taxes was deeply racialized in the reaction to the Brown decision, a racialization that helped construct people of color as outside the burdens and benefits of citizenship. Drawing on scholars of citizenship and critical legal studies, I use the letters written to the Supreme Court after Brown to trace the historical links between the popularly presumed or imputed level of participa- tion in the tax system by many white letter-writers and the entitlements that they attempted to claim from the state. My argument also engages with the work of critical legal historians by locating these identities in personal letters, transcripts and other sources produced by people affected (Hartog et al., 1985). The use of letters from individuals to institutions to illuminate the appropriation and deploy- ment of legal discourses to support aspirational rights claims has been an important method for legal historians interested in studying legal consciousness and rights-based mobilizing efforts (Goluboff, 2007; Lovell, 2012). I examined all of the several hundred letters in reaction to the Brown case in the files of the Supreme Court justices who served on the court during the post- Brown decades, limited to those whose papers have been made publicly available. This was also innately narrowed to those who saved copies of letters sent by the public, though many letters were sent in duplicate to several justices. Not including duplicates, this article involved examination of roughly 450 letters, beginning in early 1953 before the Brown decision had been announced, and continuing through 1970. Letters defending segregation came from across the country: from Seattle, California, Minnesota, and Maine, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southwest as well as states in the South and in one instance from Puerto Rico. In approximately 1/3 of these letters there was some mention of taxes, taxpayers or the idea of having ‘paid’ for a school, most often explicitly named in terms of race but also sometimes coded in the language of class groups or neighborhood residence in proximity to a racial or class divide (the only comparably frequent assertions were on the basis of parental rights or homeowner rights, though often these were con- nected to taxpaying status explicitly as well). The statements that emerge can be helpfully understood through the frame of Jane Hill’s articu- lation of ‘linguistic ideologies,’ or language frames that, while not necessarily explicitly racist, can serve as a key scaffold for white racist discourse (Hill, 2009). Taxpayer rights claims do not neces- sarily have to be racist – indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th century taxpayer rights was a com- mon legal argument made by black communities experiencing ongoing inequality in the appropriation and distribution of fiscal resources. But as many historians of white backlash in the late 20th century have shown, the trope of the disgruntled white taxpayer has been a core element of anti-civil rights, white backlash identity since the taxpayer revolt era of the 1970s. This article illuminates the earlier origins of the use of taxation as a linguistic scaffold for white racist dis- course in defense of segregation and unequal education, building on the expanded legal historiog- raphy of white backlash during the ‘long civil rights movement’ (Gross, 2012; Hall, 2005; Mack, 2009) by tracing for the first time this continuous assertion by segregationists of a legal identity as ‘taxpaying citizens.’ The use of ‘taxpayer’ legal consciousness by defenders of segregation in the Brown era pre- dated more traditionally understood timelines of ‘taxpayer revolt’ and entrenched racialized fund- ing inequalities in education and tied educational benefits to the amount of taxes presumed to be paid by a particular group. For supporters of segregation, taxpayer identity represented the right to access superior education, or ‘unequal’ education in comparison to the educational resources Walsh 239 provided to black and other minority students, a legal discourse of racial liberalism (Guinier, 2004) that rendered invisible the racist roots of school inequality. The Racialization of Taxpayer Citizenship The paradigmatic example of taxpayer identity and tax revolt today has become a white fiscal conservative opposed to federal income taxes, but white linguistic ideologies in the U.S. have long channeled racial resentment into taxpayer rights claims, particularly around black schooling and education. Historians and political scientists have deepened our knowledge of the way in which pro-segregation conservatives and white moderates deployed language of federalism, privacy rights, ‘natural’ ideas of race, economic conservatism, and location-based policies of exclusion during the civil rights movement (Kruse, 2007; Lassiter, 2007; Sokol, 2007). Yet the way in which the specific identity of ‘taxpayer’ was invested with legally imagined power and privilege by these same groups has been comparatively underexamined. While much of the work examining the threat of a ‘taxpayer revolt’ from the 1970s on has focused on the fascinating links between party political leaders and the suburban taxpayer anxiety of homeowners, this article argues that taxpayer identity was linked decades before this to a claim of privileged public position that obscured class divisions while simultaneously elevating those with ‘more’ taxable income to a position of ‘more’ rights, particularly education rights, in a ‘mar- ketplace of citizenship’ (Sunstein and Holmes, 2000; Martin, 2008). ‘Taxpayer’ identity in letters to the Supreme Court was defined as a white and middle class category, while a ‘welfare recipient’ was frequently defined as black and poor (Quadagno, 1996). In this exchange of benefits and bur- dens, the amount an individual or racial group contributed in taxes was often assumed to corre- spond to the amount and quality of rights and privileges they should or could obtain from the state (Fischel, 2001; Katz, 2008). Education has also been particularly linked to taxpaying status because education was historically rooted in local tax levies and was thus tightly connected to the idea of individual and local ‘pay-in’ in return for the public good of education. This sense of pay-in was crucial for many communities given the position education holds in a broader national narrative of meritocracy and opportunity, a position exemplified in
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