Are Colorblind Taxes Discriminatory?

This is the sort of story, sent by the all-reading Fred Ray, that makes you want to ask, “What’ll they think of next?”

Well, here’s one thing they’ve thought of. In North Carolina, civil rights lawyer Alan McSurely has argued before the state Court of Appeals that colorblind property tax assessments discriminate on the basis of race.

“McSurely argued that the tax methods need to take into account the history of discrimination” against the family of his client, a leader in the Chapel Hill-Carboro NAACP. Really. I’m not making this up.

“We want for this court to find that this method is unconstitutional,” McSurely told the three-judge panel. “It doesn’t look backward, and it doesn’t look forward.”

In Chapel Hill’s pricey housing market, the effect of colorblind tax assessment will be fewer blacks in Chapel Hill, McSurely argued. More black residents will be squeezed out, and it’s unlikely they will be replaced by other blacks, he said.

“Do we want Chapel Hill to look more white?” McSurely asked.

If McSurely is right, then colorblind sales taxes and income taxes would also be unconstitutional in North Carolina.

Assuming that capital gains taxes have a “disparate impace” on whites, would they be unconstitutional, too?

Some of the arguments made on behalf of “civil rights” these days have become so absured that it is no longer possible to make reductio ad absurdam arguments against them.