Funding White Supremacy
Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap

Examines how US federal wealth policies over the past two centuries have contributed to the modern racial wealth gap.

Robert B. Williams (Author)

9781009367868, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 June 2025

271 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.42 kg

'Williams brings both intellectual gravitas and ethical urgency to his book … His analysis contributes meaningfully to debates about how class-based instruments such as taxation can operate as vehicles of racial subordination when embedded within historically unequal structures. In doing so, the book makes a sustained effort to address the intersection of race and class analytically rather than collapsing one into the other.' Zheng Wang, Critical Inquiry

In Funding White Supremacy, Robert B. Williams shows how current federal policies have perpetuated and expanded the racial wealth gap in the United States. Through the lens of stratification economics, Williams explores how twelve tax expenditures buried in the federal tax code shower over $1 trillion annually to mostly wealthy, white households, while federal estate and gift taxes have been systematically dismantled. The book reveals how these policies originated in a period of overt racial oppression and have evolved in the modern, post-Civil Rights era, not only contributing to the expanding racial wealth gaps over the last fifty years but how they have also fostered the growth of white wealth at the expense of Black wealth. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how federal policies contribute to the vast and expanding racial wealth gap at the core of the American system of white supremacy.

1. Recognizing the Wealth – Race Nexus
2. Understanding How Households Get Ahead
3. Looking Back
4. Revealing Tax Expenditures
5. Inspecting the Leaky Bucket
6. Exploring Past Roots
7. Finding the Leaks
8. Assessing the Higher Education Ladder
9. Ending Malign Neglect.

Subject Areas: Ethnic studies [JFSL]