All inheritance should be taxed

Redistribution and Reparations

Rich baby boomers are starting to die and their privileged millennial kids (a group I’m part of) are going to inherit all of that wealth. That wealth is built on the backs of centuries of racial exploitation (slavery, colonialism, genocide), and a system built by white europeans to favor white people at every single possible level (policy, law, etc.). It’s comes as no surprise then, that the inheritance lineage favors white people.

For every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold $5.04.

Except, it is a surprise, at least to white people.

Currently, the “death tax” is only assessed on property, stocks or other assets worth more than $5.49 million ($11 million per married couple) and the GOP wants to phase it out entirely.

Wealth — at an individual, family and community level — is a major factor in everything from educational opportunity, to family nutrition, to crime, to dependence on a social safety net. A lack of wealth disproportionally affects non-whites and is chronic in in black communities.

Dismantling social services on one end and releasing the breaks on the upper end of wealth accumulation is a grossly devious preservation of whiteness that exacerbates the growing divide between the haves and have nots along racial lines.