Welcome to the Jill on Money Show.

This is the program that takes the mystery out of your financial life, but also takes a deeper dive into some issues that seem just hard to understand.

And for that part of the process of understanding and explaining, I try to find experts that are way

smarter than I am. And this weekend, in honor of Juneteenth that's coming up on Monday,

I would like to re-air segments of an interview that we conducted with Dorothy Brown.

She, at the time we spoke to her, she was at Emory and now she's at Georgetown.

But I just want to point out that this is a woman who is so smart.

She wrote a book called The Whiteness of Wealth.

And I found this book fascinating because she took a deep dive into the United States tax system and how it disadvantages black Americans. But she also has something else as part of this.

She explains the problem. She also has a solution. And I love that. So this weekend, again,

three parts. We are going to be airing this interview. And first,

let's start with a generalized explanation of what led Dorothy to write the book. So I just want to

come out of the closet right now that I, like you, I am a closet nerd. And unlike you, I am neither a lawyer or

an accountant or anything very fancy, but I love data. And so I was hoping that you could talk

a little bit about what drove you to writing the whiteness of wealth.

Yes, that's such a great question. And it started with me doing my parents' tax returns.

I was working as an investment banker, and I made by myself the income that both of my parents

made combined. My mother was a nurse, my father was a

plumber, and under our progressive tax system, I'm supposed to pay a lot more taxes than they are.

And I didn't. I paid more, but I didn't pay a lot more. And I could not figure out why. And every

April 15th, I went through the same battle and could not figure out why,

but I had a job, and I didn't have all the luxury of what I do now as an academic. So I put it

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