In this episode, I was delighted to be joined by Dr. Andrew Kahrl. Andrew is a professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. His third book was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year, titled The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America. Andrew is especially interested in issues of housing and real estate, land use and ownership, and local tax systems. He is the author of two additional books, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, and Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline. In addition to his books, Andrew regularly writes for public outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. In our conversation, we talked about how Andrew wrestled the research for his latest book into a compelling narrative argument, and why he firmly believes in the importance of history that speaks to present-day issues. He also shared some unexpected writing advice from his dad that I think you’ll enjoy hearing about.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America [affiliate link]
- The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South [affiliate link]
- Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline [affiliate link]
- Zotero
- Margaret Newkirk's Bloomberg reporting on tax liens
- Aaron Glantz, including his book Homewreckers [affiliate link]
- Dylan Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights [affiliate link]
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast all about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter. And in each episode I talk with the historian about the practices, archival frustrations and joys, drafts and revisions, and much more that go into writing history. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Andrew Kahrl.
Andrew Kahrl:
Thank you for having me on.
Kate Carpenter:
Andrew is a professor of history in African-American Studies at the University of Virginia. His third book was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year titled The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation and Dispossession in America. Andrew was especially interested in issues of housing and real estate, land use and ownership and local tax systems. He's the author of two additional books, The Land was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, and Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America's Most Exclusive Shoreline. In addition to his books, Andrew regularly writes for public outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. In our conversation, we talked about how Andrew wrestled the research for his latest book into a compelling narrative argument, why he firmly believes in the importance of history that speaks to present-day issues. And he also shared some unexpected writing advice from his dad that I think you will enjoy hearing about. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Andrew Carl.
Andrew Kahrl:
I really feel like my journey into becoming a historian began in my interest as a writer and my love of writing and of storytelling, and I think that was what always drew me to history as a subject and ultimately how I approach any of the topics I write on. And I mean that really began as really at an early age in terms of my love of writing and my desire to make sense of the world through the lives and experiences of people, of places in order to arrive at some of those larger lessons about conditions we live with today.
Kate Carpenter:
So let's talk a little bit first about just the basics of how you work. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, I mean, I am not someone who likes to write in coffee shops or in any kind of distracting environment. I very much prize solitude and places where I can have minimal interference except from having a nice view somewhere in the room I'm in. I tend to write and bursts, I guess, you could say. I'm not the type, even though I've got that advice early on in graduate school and early in my career about the importance of writing every day or at least carving out time, that's never really worked for me. I tend to have these intense periods of writing, whether it be just a week of focused on completing whether it be a chapter, an article, or even just carving out a day write an op-ed. So it's one where I'm very… I do kind of have my own sort of habits and routines, but it's one in which it's like when I know I'm ready to write something, I kind of clear the deck and then just sort of go into writing mode as opposed to a daily habit, I guess you could say.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you have a specific time you find best for writing?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, I'm very much a morning writer. I feel like my ability to write begins at a of high plane early in the morning, and it's steadily declines pretty much from, I think until about 8:00 in the morning until about 1:00 in the afternoon is really I can really bang out the pages and get a lot of work done. And then I usually use the kind of afternoon, especially the evening after I let it sit for a while and walked away from it, did family stuff and had dinner and put the kids to bed. And then I go back and look at what I wrote that morning. But it's definitely the first draft of anything really, I think for me at least, I try to carve out time in the morning.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize your research and notes?
Andrew Kahrl:
I spend a lot of time working on an outline, especially for when I'm working on chapters in a book or even, say, for an article. I will really spend a lot of time writing up an outline that is just very detailed, almost getting down to just writing out the sentences but in outline form. And then spending almost as much time, if not more time, working on the outline than I do writing and then taking that outline and then sitting down and putting it into narrative form. And the reason why I do that is because I found that sometimes if I just sit down and open up a Word doc and just start pouring it out, then I can go down many different paths and I might feel a burst of inspiration and just start writing away, but I won't have a kind of direction that I would like. Sometimes I'll find myself then going back and tearing it all up and starting over again or really struggling to sort of revise it.
So I sort of really try to have a clear sense of direction before I start the writing process. And a lot of that comes through the outlining of my ideas in a very highly detailed, like having all the evidence, having the examples and playing around with that. I find it's much easier to move parts around within a manuscript in outline form than once you have it in written form because then you have the transitions, you have this sort of the flow that sometimes gets disrupted when you start moving paragraphs around, although certainly I end up doing that as well, but I try to sort of minimize that through the spending a lot of time outlining my ideas before I sit down to write.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there tools that you use to organize your research?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, I've become a pretty devoted Zotero user and I think it works for me, or at least I kind of committed myself to it many years ago and I can't go back now, but I kind of keep everything organized. I mean, literally one of the ways that I am able to track down sources on virtually anything or even just find sources that mention a particular person or concept or event, I can go into that database and pull up material related to that instantaneously. And I sort of really rely on that to be able to keep track of my ideas and keep track of the evidence that relate to particular points that I'm trying to make or moments in history that I'm trying to explain.
Kate Carpenter:
What does your revision process look like? I know you talked about drafting in the morning and revisiting in the evening.
Andrew Kahrl:
I mean, especially with this book that I just finished where there was massive amounts of revision, I mean there was kind of the revision that would be happening on a day-to-day basis or the revision I would do after I would complete a first draft. And that would happen whether it be like I said in the evenings after I finished working on a particular section or carving out a week or more to just kind of go back and reread and rethink what it was I laid out. And also as well, I mean just sort of getting feedback and input from friends, colleagues and people whose advice I really lean on.
But then also at the end stage, I mean I had pulled together a really esteemed group of my colleagues to read the entire manuscript after I'd finished the draft. And based on a lot of the feedback and advice I got there, I went back and began to restructure the entirety of it and began to move bits and pieces around. And that played out over the course of several months.
So it's kind of at different scales of revision, but one I think is that the one thing I always kind of keep in mind, especially when I'm writing that first draft, is I always know that this is going to look a lot different in print than it is right now. I mean, I kind of accept that. I know that what I'm doing right now is getting something on the page, getting the ball rolling and knowing that it's going to change directions and that there might be pages and pages of stuff that I'm writing right now that will never find its way into the book, but the act of doing it and kind of getting it out there is critical to then ultimately find arriving at that final draft.
Kate Carpenter:
So The Black Tax, which we're focusing on today, is your third book, have you changed your approach to writing with each book or has it stayed pretty consistent?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, it's sort of evolved. And I think it's evolved as the technology has evolved. I mean, when I first began grad school, this was in the early 2000s and I felt like we were still in that kind of phase where I was still writing stuff on notecards.
Actually, when I was going through some old files and I found this old notecard file where I would just, I remember sitting in the library just reading books and writing down by hand quotes and writing the name of the author in the upper left-hand corner.
Some of the chapters that ultimately went in my dissertation and ultimately my first book we're a product of that sort of organizational scheme. But very early on, that didn't last long. Pretty much by the time I was finishing my dissertation and beginning revisions into the first book, I moved most of that onto Word docs, but I hadn't really come up with any sort of system. It was still very much like a kind of hybrid of physical files. I would come back from an archive. Now we just bring our phone into the archive and just take thousands of pictures of the documents. I mean, when I was doing work then it was you would have to order Xerox copies of everything or write it all down in the archive. And so I had all these different documents, some were physical, some had been the product of me jotting down notes. Others were in various sort of places.
And it kind of became, especially as I was working on that first book, it became very unwieldy. I became very sort of stressed over just, "Where was this?" or, "How do I find this?" Or, "I remember reading this, but I can't locate where it is." And I kind of said to myself when I got to the end of that book and I took a deep breath and I said, "Never again. The next book project, I'm going to have a system in place from day one so I know where everything is." And that's kind of when I cast my lot with Zotero as a sort of organizational system for keeping all of my material together.
And so since then, starting with my second book, Free The Beaches, I began this kind of system of just keeping all of my notes into that database where I can pull up anything at the moment whenever it comes to mind. And then also working on this, the detailed outline before beginning a draft. And so that's kind of been what I've stuck to and it's worked for me.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to talk a little bit about big picture research in the sense that you mentioned to me ahead of time that this book in some ways is a departure from your first two books, especially as it deals with taxes and fiscal policy, and that meant really immersing yourself in some other fields. How did you go about that sort of self-education?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, no, that was really early on when I was making these initial discoveries of examples of, say, African American homeowners who were being unfairly overtaxed or were losing their land or their homes to tax sales. The first question I had was, "Why have I not heard about this before? Why have no one written about this? Or why is this not incorporated into our understanding of structural racism in America and the laws, public policies that have fueled inequality and undermined African-Americans struggles for justice and equality?"
So my first question is, "Where can I find more scholarship on this?" I found that there'd been economists, legal scholars, who'd written bits and pieces on this. There have been some good journalistic work that had been done at various moments in history. So I began turning to those sources, but then really spending a lot of time asking myself, "Okay, well how do tax assessments work? What are the laws and procedures governing this? What are these tax sales and how do they operate? How are they conducted? What does it mean when you don't pay your property taxes on time, or if say for whatever reason a tax bill is not received or recorded?"
So I've really kind of spent a lot of time just digging into the specifics of the laws and administrative procedures and the places where I was finding this because one thing I recognized early on is that the laws are different in different states and localities. So the first task was just to begin to sort of understand what was happening in the examples that I was finding and begin to build out from there, getting a handle on one story, one case from there beginning to compare it to others that I was learning, and also as well begin to get a grasp on the historical development evolution of local tax law and policy, how it has taken shape over time. But it was very much a process of leaning on. I spent a lot of time and I still spent a lot of time hanging around law schools and hitting up my colleagues at the law school for just explaining what it was I was observing and spending a lot of time consulting source material that is far outside of what you would typically see in history scholarship.
Kate Carpenter:
This seems like a good moment to dive a little deeper into Andrew's new book. To do that, I asked him to read an excerpt from The Black Tax for us. Here's Dr. Andrew Carl reading from chapter 3 of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.
Andrew Kahrl:
"In 1884, Caesar Scott purchased 40 acres of land on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Over the next 50 years. The former slave, his children, and his grandchildren grew rice and vegetables, raised livestock, fished, and tried to live as self-sufficiently as they could. By the early 1930s, the family's homestead, which had grown to 66 acres and included two barrier islands, had passed down to Scott's granddaughter, Evelina Jenkins."
"The family held tight to their independence. The meat expenses, Jenkins sold some of the okra, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes she grew at the market in the town of Buford on the mainland. And as a young woman, she had worked in white family's homes, but otherwise she lived off the land. Among those expenses were property taxes. Jenkins struggled each year to round up the cash needed to pay the bill to Beaufort County. Jenkins, like many of the Gullah families living on the sea islands, rarely ventured into town, much less into the county's courthouse. So she, like many others, entrusted a white person. In this case, Attorney William Levin, for whom she had previously worked as a domestic servant to take her tax payment to town and pay it on her behalf."
"Levin shared an office building with the county sheriff, J.E. McTeer, the man in charge of collecting tax payments. Each year, McTeer was also in charge of auctioning off the liens on properties that have become tax delinquent."
"Jenkins' 1931 tax payment never arrived, but she did not know this, nor did she know that McTeer would assess a lien on her land and put it up for auction the following year, which she did. The price, $26. The buyer, William Levin. After a year past, Levin claimed the deed to all of Jenkins 66 acres."
"Another thing Jenkins did not know, for Levin, it was a speculative investment that he could wait to cash in. For decades afterward, Levin kept up the ruse of taking Jenkins tax payment to town, having her pay, that is, on property that was no longer hers. It was one of 60 properties in Beaufort County that Levin had claimed at the tax sale."
Kate Carpenter:
Talk to me about what went into writing this passage.
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, I mean, this was a story I discovered early on in the research process and one that took a lot of time and really took the work of others to help piece together. So the story of Evelina Jenkins was first reported by the New York Times in a piece back in the 1970s, early 1970s, that was calling attention to this crisis of Black land loss was unfolding across the rural south and in particular in places like the South Carolina sea islands that were experiencing intensive real estate development and a real uptick in interest and the undeveloped lands that was mostly Black-owned at the time.
From there, I began to try to find more that I could about the family, about Evelina Jenkins herself. And later, this was in 2019, this was around the time when Congress was holding the hearings on reparations, this was in the news again, talking about the legacy and history of racial injustice in America, and I wrote an op-ed that was in the New York Times that used Jenkins' story to of highlight the systematic theft of African-American-owned land and really calling attention here to not just the kind of denial of opportunities to build wealth that African-Americans have experienced historically, which much of the conversation around reparations centered on, but also the dispossession of the property and wealth that African-Americans had accumulated, especially in the century following emancipation and under Jim Crow.
Her story really exemplified that. I mean, here was a family that had acquired a build up a land base and then later saw… And just as it was becoming valuable, just as it became had the potential to become a vehicle for upward mobility for the family, or even just to remain what it was, the family's homestead, that it was then targeted, became a source of exploitation.
And so in telling that story and using it as example, and also I still believe this strongly, I mean in these conversations over the history and legacy of racial injustice, it's one thing to call attention to the crimes of the past. But here, and I made that point at the time, here are laws and procedures that have consistently disadvantaged African-Americans and poor and vulnerable property owners in general that are ongoing and that are perfectly legal and are still happening today.
And so that was the sort of point. I was like, "Any conversation of a reparations also needs to focus on transformation of the laws and policies that continue to fuel inequality, especially through housing and real estate markets." So this comes out, it was in the Sunday New York Times and attracted attention, including from a journalist who worked writing for Bloomberg, Margaret Newkirk, who was really strucked by the story and wanted to learn more about Jenkins. And so she started going down and digging through the records in Beaufort County and made some discoveries that were critical to then what went into that paragraph about who purchased the lien. She found the records that then helped me piece together this story as well as the interviews I was doing with folks who were working on behalf of families like the Jenkins at the time.
This happened at the same time that the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, which is the historic civil rights organization, was starting these initiatives aimed at protecting African-American landowners, families like the Jenkins. And I talked to folks who were part of that initiative and they spoke to what the impact of Jenkins' plight was on the broader community. And so it all kind of then that one example here that I point to.
Kate Carpenter:
One of your challenges in this book as often faces people who write about subjects like property tax and liens and assessments is that that material is really important but is also inherently dry, which really is part of why people often don't pay attention to it. So what were your strategies in this book for making sure that readers stay really engaged?
Andrew Kahrl:
Well, I think the passage I just read is an example of the larger approach I took to this, which was to really focus on the consequences and the practical, what the implications of the laws and structures that I was describing. What did it mean for the people whose lives were being affected by this?
I think one of the kind of approaches that I took from the outset was that in describing this structure and kind of explaining how local tax systems work, how they evolved and how they fueled inequality both within and between places and within different groups in society, that in detailing the structure and describing all of its parts, I also had to describe what it meant to live inside of it, and that's to humanize this, to show that these dry and in some hands could be seemingly opaque and not really depersonalized are actually very personal. These are affecting people's lives in both subtle and sometimes profound ways. And so I always, throughout, was whenever an instance where I was trying to explain something, doing so through the stories of the people whose lives were affected by what it was I was explaining.
Kate Carpenter:
So in researching this book, you had research that ranged from the minutia of property tax records to interviewing people who had been affected by these issues or whose families had. How did you weave those very different types of sources together?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah. In many ways, they kind of each shaped and informed the other, meaning that people's experiences, what they were describing to me in interviews, what I was learning through those oral histories would lead me to search in that minutia to understand and explain what was happening.
And at the same time what I was coming across in the records, whether it be in the archives or just through getting a more detailed understanding of how local property tax assessments work, how tax sales work, what I was learning just through educating myself on this history and these laws then were shaping the questions that I was asking of my interviewees so that I could begin to tease out what the impact was for them personally. And then just even through those conversations, begin to get an appreciation of, "What mattered? What were the sort of most salient factors here? What were the most aspects of this that were particularly relevant to understanding the outcomes?" The outcomes meaning the realities of how housing markets did not work for Black people in the same way that they did for white Americans, the realities of how African-Americans struggles to acquire and accumulate and hold on to land and how taxes affected that, and also the realities of the distribution of public goods and resources at the local level.
So having that kind of back and forth between the expertise of the "experts" and the source material, but also the real expertise coming from the people who I was engaging with, whose stories ultimately fill the pages of the book.
Kate Carpenter:
That may be a bit of an answer to my next question, but you mentioned in your email to me ahead of time that one of the real challenges with the book like this is that you're both tackling these huge systemic bureaucratic issues, but you also don't want to lose sight of agency and resiliency and how people are experiencing this. How did you balance that while you were writing the book?
Andrew Kahrl:
It was a challenge, and I still sort of wonder how it all kind of came together because in one respect, every time I sort of sat down and began to conceptualize what a chapter of this book was going to look like, how was I going to tell this story, I sort of tried to really keep in mind how do I explain these larger structural features of local taxation in America. How do I explain what that meant for African Americans in particular and how did they experience this? And so I kept that as the sort of focus.
I think I realized early on in the process, I was writing a book about African Americans' experiences as taxpayers, their experiences within local tax systems in all of its phases, both in the administration, the enforcement, and the distribution of public dollars. One thing that I continually came back to was how do I balance this really, I think, highly localized process with what our broader, almost national, trends and developments that of effects that have national significance because I didn't want to tell a local history that was only, say, applicable to Chicago, for instance, a place that I do spend a lot of time on in the book, or South Carolina. I didn't want to write a series of case studies. Here we go from one place to the next.
I wanted to pull this all together into a larger narrative that span a long period of time from reconstruction up to the present, but also was able to pull in examples and arrive at larger understandings of how this system as a whole work that weren't bound to one particular place. And that was a real challenge because as I mentioned earlier, I mean these laws are different in every state. The way that property taxes were administered and enforced vary dramatically in different contexts.
So that was a real challenge in thinking, "Okay, how do I sort of weave this together? How do I bring these local stories in particular experiences and sometimes sort of unique to the laws and the people administering those laws in those particular places at the same time begin to show this as one part of a larger history that also as well remains ongoing to this day?" I think one thing that I state at the outset is, this is a history of injustice and people's struggles against it that was very much unresolved. The laws and procedures governing property assessments that allow for and in some ways consistently produce these inequitable results are still in place today.
Tax sales and the exploitation of them by predatory investors and the disproportionate effects that has on low-income, communities of color are happening right now. And so in a sense, that also kind of gave the writing of this book a sense of urgency, a sense of direct relevance to conversations happening today and sort of efforts to intervene and cycles of injustice. And so I think that was something that I tried to really keep in mind as I was writing this and sort of make clear at various points just how much this past continues to sort of shape the present in direct ways.
Kate Carpenter:
I can't help but be struck while you're talking, while I was reading, that this is an unwieldy book, it feels like to write. I mean, it covers a huge amount of time from reconstruction to the present. It covers wide varieties of sources, as you mentioned, different localities that all have different laws and different histories, and that is hard enough to research. But then to wrestle that all into a narrative that goes together, how did you do that? I mean, you mentioned early on in this conversation that there was a lot of research, or sorry, a lot of revision. Was that part of it?
Andrew Kahrl:
Yeah, no, one of the things that I think I mentioned earlier, I had a really productive, crucial workshop of the entire manuscript in which I brought up… The first draft of the manuscript, it moved forward in time, but it consisted of these very bulky chapters that in some ways wove. It almost had too much weaving together of these different elements. In sense, it was these larger chapters that maybe I had a chapter on reconstruction in Jim Crow that encompassed the discriminatory over assessment of African American landowners, the maldistribution of public goods and resources by local governments, whether it be school funding down to water and sewers and sidewalks, and as well, the exploitation and abuse of tax delinquency laws to dispossess African American landowners in the Jim Crow cell.
So that was all in one chapter, and I presented it to my colleagues and we had a… It was great to see how so important to hear how flummoxed they were at various points about just how much was being… It was described as sort of drinking water from a fire hose at points. So it was coming at from all different directions. And in a sense, those chapters didn't work because of that.
At one point in the workshop, I'll never forget, I was kind of explaining how I organized the research, or when I was going through the research process, how I was of mentally putting the material into different compartments. And in a sense I said, "Well, there's three different elements of local tax systems here, both how they're administered, who's in charge of assessing property values and administering tax payments, how the money is spent, so how do local tax systems distribute revenue and how are those spending decisions made. And then thirdly, how is it enforced and what are the consequences for non-compliance and how do those laws work."
And as I was explaining that, one of my colleagues jumped up and said like, "That would be a much better way to help us begin to understand what's happening here, to disentangle these parts and tell them parallel to each other, but then sort of working up to a greater understanding of the whole." And so it was through the confusion, I guess, of that first draft and how it wasn't really working in the sense that readers were being thrown in different directions. And I could, in retrospect, see how it would be hard to make sense of what was happening here.
That then, I went back and essentially tore the entire thing down to its studs and rebuilt it. What I mean by that is I didn't start rewriting it, but I reorganized it. And I reorganized it into what the book is now, which are five parts that begin with one on reconstruction and Jim Crow going up through the great Migration, through the civil rights era through the 1970s and up to the present. Within those five parts, there are three chapters that focus on administration, spending, and enforcement. And through that we kind of move forward in time, but at the same time, we're sort of seeing how each of these sort of work in different ways.
And also that resulted in instead of having these long chapters, which I think as a reader when I'm reading books, I'm like, "Gosh, can we take a break here? I might need to go have a snack or do something." And so instead, now the book has much shorter chapters. And I think I hope that readers appreciate that. I certainly, as a reader, I always appreciate that as well. And I think about time for us authors to sort of follow what it is that we prize and others work.
Kate Carpenter:
I'm switching gears just a little bit here, but you mentioned an op-ed in the New York Times. You've done a lot of writing of that sort of op-eds and columns. And you provide historical context as many historians do writing those, but I'm struck that you also really make strong policy arguments often. Why is that kind of work important to you?
Andrew Kahrl:
My interest in history from the outset why I decided to go to grad school, why I've always been drawn to study in the past was to get a greater understanding of the world we're living in today and ultimately to begin to understand or at least have pathways towards changing the world we live in.
I think implicit within any interpretation of the past or of the world are lessons and insights for those who are looking to change it. I don't sort of do so and I try to avoid in a kind of simplistic or didactic manner, but rather just to sort of show whatever issues in particular that are on the public's agenda or I feel like should be. I think this is very much a book that is trying to call attention to problems that have been hiding in plain sight that have not really gotten the attention that they deserve, that we need to look to the past to begin to understand and make sense of what's happening in the present and begin to, for others especially, whether it be lawmakers, whether it be activists, whether it be anyone sort of working on the issues that I write about, that we can begin to then devise deeper understandings of the problems that we're faced with today and begin to envision solutions.
And so I think that historians have important contributions to make to those public conversations, and we shouldn't be afraid to of step out there and begin to offer our own perspectives on policy debates that are informed by our deep inversion and the issues and the histories that we're working on.
And so this was very much a book that I went into and got interested in this subject not just out of a kind of intellectual curiosity, but as a real sense that this is an important story that needs to be told, not just to fellow historians, because I think that we would do well to spend much more time looking at fiscal systems and administration and how taxes shape the world we live in today and sort of in so many ways, but also from that begin to offer new perspectives on tax policy debates, which I think oftentimes I'll sort of go back here to the beginning stages of when I started working on this book.
It was like 2012, the presidential election, we all remember Mitt Romney's infamous 47% statement where claimed that 47% of Americans don't pay taxes and therefore just kind of living off the state. And we think about the long history of racists racially-laden politics around taxpayer rights and taxpayer citizenship in America. And here I'm finding evidence here of African Americans being unfairly overtaxed, of being systematically disadvantaged by local tax systems, and being dispossessed of their property through these laws and procedures and just how much that showed that not only were these claims. And statements and assumptions that were so prevalent in the wider public, not only were they sort of misleading, but they were almost in some ways the mere opposite of the lived reality that I was observing.
So that right there, I think the first thing I wrote about this at all was just a small piece that was in History News Network that was just trying to lay out here of questioning some of the assumptions and beliefs that were shaping how we thought about taxes in the past and in the present. And so I've continued to think that that's an important part of the work we do, should be an important part of the work we do as historians, is to translate our work to the wider public and begin to show why this stuff matters and why learning this history is not just a kind of exercise and discovering the past or recovering voices, but speaking directly to issues today.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to turn and ask a little bit about your own inspirations. So are there other authors who you read as inspirations, either topically or as craft?
Andrew Kahrl:
I've been looking a lot both in this book and in thinking through next projects. I've been really leaning on a lot of the work of investigative journalists, financial writers, people who've written about private equity. I've been devouring books and articles on various aspects of our financial system in industries today. So works by Aaron Glantz or Brandon Ballou.
But also as well, I always am really attracted to historians who confound some of our assumptions or challenge, some of the prevailing frameworks in which we write about the subject that my work, and the interests in particular, and looking at African Americans engagements with the law and struggles for civil rights. So Dylan Penningroth's new book has been really profoundly insightful to me. It's one of those books that when you start… I didn't pick it up until I'd finished my book, and that was one of those books where I was like, "Oh man, I wish I would've spent more time delving into this." But that's always what happens when you're working on a book, is you have to accept the fact that there's going to be stuff coming out subsequent to that you're not going to be able to incorporate into it. But his work has been really crucially insightful.
But as well, I mean I'm attracted to sort of historians and writers who place an emphasis on explaining things in ways that are accessible that demystify the past and begin to work toward clarity. I think maybe that of comes from my initial interest and kind of doing investigative journalism and doing the kind of work. And sometimes I sort of picture some of what I'm doing is more akin to that of investigative journalists than a historian, or at least in how I went about unpacking this history. And I really appreciate the kinds of works that try to bring really complex, opaque processes down to a level in which a non-expert can readily understand this.
I mean that was something when I started working on this book and I said, "Why has no one written about this?" And first I discovered, "Well, people have been writing about it, but they're kind of speaking to very small audiences of other experts." A lot of the work on local taxation were being written in ways that were speaking to other legal scholars or speaking to particularly narrow audiences, practitioners, and people who are deeply immersed in the mechanics of tax systems.
And that's important stuff and it certainly helped me understand it, but it took me a long time to begin to even understand what I was reading. I could understand how few would have the patients to begin to do that kind of work. And I thought that it was important, at least what I tried to really focus on was how can I begin to explain this in a way that a non-expert could readily understand and appreciate. And that's why, again, grounding this in human experiences and human stories, I thought I think is one way to do that. But also just to kind of avoid jargon, avoid the kinds of complicating things in ways that are unnecessary. I mean, these are complicated processes and procedures that need explanation and all their nuances, but you don't have to necessarily write in a way that makes it even more difficult to grasp what it is that you're observing.
Kate Carpenter:
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Andrew Kahrl:
Honestly, it was something my dad told me one time. When I was a kid, I was… Well, I think I was a freshman in high school and maybe a sophomore. I spent a lot of time in middle school. Even as early as middle school, I was really into writing in whatever it was I was of interested in at the time. And so when I was in middle school, I had my own little sports newsletter where I write about like NFL football or college football and write a journalistic style. You mimic sort of writers for Sports Illustrated and the newspapers that our family got. I would go around and I would write up these publications and sell them to my teachers.
And one thing, and I'm even looking back on it, and I still have a couple of those copies I found in an old box of materials, I really kind of tried to write in a very kind of using active verbs in a very direct. I was kind of in some ways mimicking the style of the writers who I was learning this from. And then I got to a point in high school where I started stopped caring about sports as much and moved on to deeper thoughts and exploring all these sort of politics in particular and I was now writing for the school newspaper. I distinctly remember writing a draft of a piece that I was working on. It was like, I had all these big words and kind of complex sentences. I thought it was so profound.
I always share my stuff with my dad who was an English professor. He always was really loved spending time giving me feedback and talking about the craft of writing. I remember bringing this draft down to him. I was really proud of myself, and I could wait to hear what keep it praise on it. And he just was like, "This is garbage. This it is just absolutely unreadable. You're just trying to sound smart and it's pompous." And he was absolutely right. And it reminded me, it's like I felt like this kind of compulsion to sort of sound smart or write in a way that in some ways create a distance between me and my readers, and that was the exact opposite approach we should be taking as writers. And my dad sort of reminded me of that. He said, "Go back to writing the way you did when you were in 6th grade." Here I was I was like, "Oh, I'm about ready to go to college. I'm getting ready for entering the world." And he's reminding me that actually when I was over 13, I was actually a more effective writer."
And it sort stuck with me because it was reminding me, and I still hold this true to this. The point is communicating with your audience and creating understanding. The best way to do that is to sort of write in a way that you can present complex ideas and challenging concepts in a way that is accessible and readily understandable. I think that was something that always have appreciated the brutal honesty of people who I trust.
In fact, when I was in grad school, I remember hanging around the grad student lounge and people would talk about it like, "Oh, this professor, he's really tough, man. He just will rip your stuff to shreds." And I was like, "Oh, I should should take a class with him. He sounds great." I mean, because I thought that you need to have that kind of someone who's going to be tough, but tough in a way that is going to push you to see some of the sort of ways in which you can not just sharpen your analysis, but enhance your ability to communicate. And that's ultimately all writing is, it's communicating ideas. Your effectiveness as a writer is, I think, ultimately dependent on just how well it comes across to your audiences.
For this book, especially my audience is the general public. It is definitely speaking at once to both academic audiences, scholars working in my field, but it's also aiming to speak to a broader public who is concerned about inequality in America and the forces that are fueling inequality and tries to sort of explain one dimension of that, one of those hidden engines of inequality in a way that we can begin to understand the various components of it, begin to see how the system works as a whole, and begin to think through ways to address it. And so, if you're writing in a way that is inaccessible to those audiences, then you're really doing a disservice to the history that you're trying to communicate.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, can I ask if there's anything you're working on now that you want to talk about?
Andrew Kahrl:
Well, I mean, I've been working a lot on both on the one hand thinking through how do I begin to take this history and apply it more directly to whether it be policy conversations, particular issues that are happening today.
So since the book came out, this is very much a live issue in cities like Chicago, for instance, where they just recently, as I wrote about in one of the last chapters of the book, they recently elected a reformer to the county assessor's office who came in with the expectation of addressing the ongoing over-taxation of Black and low-income neighborhoods, other inequities within the tax assessment process. And so I've been spending time talking with folks in those offices and spending time talking to audiences in Chicago, whether it be local officials, whether it be activists, whether it be other concerned citizens and making clear, "I'm a historian here." I'm not a policy expert, but I think the history can really sort of offer a lot of important insights into the scope of the problems that voters and public officials are looking to address today.
So that's one thing, is really trying to sort of… Now that the book is out, now that this history is being told and read, to begin to communicate some of those larger takeaways and initiating conversations with audiences that are already doing this work or already trying to find points of intervention into, say, the problems of tax sales and their effects on disadvantaged communities into the ongoing issues regarding public funding for the critical needs of local communities. So that's one element. It's in a sense kind of sort of engaging with policymakers, engaging with the public, whether it be through writing op-eds or short pieces, or sort of taking parts of this history and shining the spotlight on it.
But also, I think, as I mentioned earlier, I mean something that if there's one kind of theme that connects all three of my books in very much my larger research agenda is looking at histories of exploitation and resistance to exploitative practices and systems and how that begins to help us understand and get a handle on capitalism in America today and in the past, and how African Americans have been affected by and work to resist some of its inequitable and exploitative features.
And so that is something that's really led me to sort of look even more deeply into financial markets, both as it applies to housing and real estate, which is one area that I spend a lot of time in my work addressing, but even more broadly than that. And so we'll see where that leads, but I think that's kind of where I'm thinking right now.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, Dr. Andrew Kahrl, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about your writing process.
Andrew Kahrl:
Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Drafting the Past. For show notes and a complete transcript, visit draftingthepast.com. There you'll also find past episodes, show merchandise, and more. If you'd like to support the show, you can leave a review on your favorite podcast app, tell a friend about it, or even give financial support at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Thanks for helping me keep this conversation alive and for remembering that friends don't let friends write boring history.
