DEI and the taxpayer
Last month, Republican lawmakers in South Carolina discussed proposals to bar public colleges from spending state funding on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Among the supporters was Rep. Adam Morgan, who argued that colleges were promoting what he considered to be “very political ideologies” — on the backs, he said repeatedly, of state taxpayers.
Later, Democratic lawmakers spoke against the proposals. Rep. Ivory Thigpen, who is Black, asked: “Just because someone else feels that they want to determine what happens with taxpayer dollars doesn’t mean that that’s the same way that I feel about it. And am I not a taxpayer? Do not the 40,000 people, approximately, that I represent also get a say?”
The proposals, made as amendments to the state budget, were voted down, but Republicans expressed interest in later revisiting the issue.
Bills banning colleges from spending funds on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are flooding state legislatures across the country. I recently wrote about how some of these bills would prevent colleges from spending any money, including private donations and federal grants, on diversity efforts — the legality of which remains fuzzy.
While touting their bills, however, lawmakers often say their primary objective is to protect state taxpayers.
Who are these taxpayers? What do lawmakers really mean when they invoke them? Does the public understand what “taxpayer” means, or has their understanding been warped by misuse of the term?
I spoke with someone who has investigated these questions: Camille Walsh, an associate professor at the University of Washington at Bothell and the author of Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship 1869-1973 (UNC Press, 2018).
The history of “taxpayers”
The use of the term “taxpayers” originated in the 19th century as government-funded public resources became increasingly available, Walsh said.
A premise took hold that persists to this day, she said: “Taxpayer” was code for white men, the primary taxpaying group at the time. The idea of a white male head of household became embedded in the national consciousness.
Saying “taxpayer” became a way to imply that only certain groups of people pay taxes, Walsh said. In reality, very few people today are not part of the taxation system.
Over the last century, the public’s understanding of what “taxpayer” means, she said, has been muddled by weaponization of the term — by both major political parties.
In a 1965 address to Congress, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, said, “I want to be the president who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of tax eaters” — a reference to low-income people who relied on the government’s social safety net.
Walsh said this type of language has for decades misled people into perceiving that only some people pay taxes. She argued that Johnson would likely never have referenced some groups, such as veterans, as “tax eaters,” despite their own taxpayer-funded benefits.
Walsh said she isn’t surprised that references to taxpayers have made their way into recent debates about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Using the term serves the goals of some lawmakers who, she said, “want to entrench divisions and encourage people to be afraid of some outside other that’s coming for their resources, or coming for their whatever amount of money they’re paying into the public coffers.”
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has talked about the need to protect “Florida taxpayers” with bans on colleges’ diversity spending.
Walsh pointed out that Florida has no individual income tax, even though the issues are being framed with the idea of taxpayer reciprocity in mind. Low-income people and people of color — who are among the intended beneficiaries of campus diversity efforts — contribute a disproportionate share of tax dollars in states like Florida that depend on sales tax, she said. (Florida also has a corporate income tax and a property tax.)
A term Walsh suggests could be used instead of “taxpayers” is “public funds.”
“I don’t think that for most people, they think twice when they hear the phrase ‘taxpayer,’” Walsh said. “But I do think it does this insidious harm because it always implies that there’s a non-taxpayer out there.”
—Kate Marijolovic
