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Tax policy can be a powerful tool for enhancing racial and ethnic equity, but two new reports show how recent tax changes at the state and federal level have disproportionately blocked households of color from receiving tax cuts, even as they protected or expanded tax cuts aimed at wealthy, white households. State and federal tax systems affect taxpayers of different races differently, even when those policies don’t explicitly mention race. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “How the Federal Tax Code Can Better Advance Racial Equity” explains how seemingly “race-neutral” provisions in the tax...

By Jonathan Cohn, Assistant Professor of Digital Cultures, University of Alberta In 1988, after United States Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s videotape rental history was leaked to the press, Congress realised the threat that new technologies, through the clandestine buying and selling of personal data, had to the well-being of all citizens. They acted to fix the problem with the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a law that forbids the sharing of video tape rental information to anyone. While a law focused on videotape rental information may seem esoteric and anachronistic, debates at the time of its writing show...

By Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter. This trope, “the good guy with a gun,” has become commonplace among gun rights activists. Where did it come from? On December 21, 2012, one week after Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,...