NPR.

Ever since she was little, Dorothy Brown dreamed of someday becoming an attorney.

I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, who was one of my heroes.

But you know, life sometimes has a way of making us reconsider our hopes and dreams.

And Dorothy says, by the time she got to college.

I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn't want it to have anything to do with race.

I decided it would be too painful for me to deal with racism every day as a black woman.

And then have to go to work and deal with the substantive law that dealt with racism.

So she went searching for a new dream and found it of all places in a tax accounting class.

And that's when the light boat went off.

Oh my god, I love this. I want to do tax law because the only color that matters is green.

The IRS has dreams of rules and regulations governing who pays for what and how much.

And race never enters the equation.

At least that is what Dorothy thought.

This is the indicator for plan of money.

I'm Adrian Ma.

And I'm Stacy Vannick Smith.

It is tax season.

And even if you find yourself plowing through pages and pages of mind and numbing forms,

you will not be asked to take a box declaring your race or ethnicity.

But Dorothy, who did just tax-lied emery university, has come to believe that race and tax

are closely intertwined.

...