Thread by @schooldaves

I've been trying to better understand how Roe v. Wade got overturned. Something I didn't know until now is that school finance--specifically, efforts to preserve tax exemption for segregated christian schools & perpetuate a white lifeworld--is at the heart of the story.🧵

It was @KnowYrEnemyPod's recent series on "How They Did it" that tipped me off, citing @rickperlstein's Reaganland. If you haven't listened to the podcasts and read the book, I recommend them both.

The context is the formation of the 'new right'. 1/x

…ow-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/how-t…

They cite an essay "The Real Origins of the Religious Right" tracing its origins to a lawsuit filed in 1969 about the tax exempt status of whites-only 'Christian' schools opened to push back against desegregation. 2/x politico.com/magazine/story…

The original case was called Green v. Kennedy. In 1969, the first year of desegregation in their school district, Black parents in the Holmes County watched as their white neighbors did a school strike to protest desegregation. 3/x
law.justia.com/cases/federal/…

Balmer notes that "the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero." These white parents took their kids out of the public school and started private schools that were white-only. 4/x

The segregation academies were founded as non-profit entities. Under the 501(c)(3) law governing non-profits, the institutions themselves didn't have to pay taxes. law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26… 5/x

But not only that, under Internal Revenue Code 170(c)(2), those donating to the foundations could deduct their donations from gross income tax.

Basically, if you give money to these segregation academies then you didn't have to pay taxes on the income you used to pay them. 6/x

But the Green case undid all this: the judge found in favor of the plaintiffs!

Not only that, but Richard Nixon--fearing the collapse of local control after several state courts found school finance unconstitutional & illegal--changed the IRS code too. 7/x

To be clear: think of tax exemption as govt expenditure.

When the government decides not to tax what you have, you can kind of see it as the government giving you that money.

So the racists found a way to get a tax expenditure for their segregation academies. 7a/x

This tax exemption was a key material condition of white segregation post-Brown v. Board--which, remember, was mostly a publicity stunt during the Cold War: communists kept saying how unequal and unfree the US was, so the ruling class had to shut them up. 7b/x

The political economist of education Martin Carnoy once wrote that schools have a legitimate public claim to maintaining society's continuity. So imagine what it was like for white supremacists to integrate schools? They lost the means of maintaining their whole lifeworld. 8/x

The Green case pissed off evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS sent queries to church-related schools like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he said, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.” 9/x

Evangelicals hadn't been super political, but conservative activists wanted to get activated to form a voting bloc. The loss of their white Christian schools' tax exemption status did the trick. But they couldn't come out and fight for this explicitly--it was too racist. 10/x

That's where abortion comes in. Balmer writes in another longer essay that abortion was the issue evangelicals could fight against as a sort of proxy or trojan horse to win back the loss of their white world. 11/x amc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/…

I lay it all out here with more detail. And if you want readable socialist analysis of education with a focus on finance, sign up for the newsletter! buttondown.email/davidibacker/a…

Important clarification that I hadn’t seen: the “it’s all about segregated schools and only got taken up later” narrative is over-simplified. I think the issue was still in the mix and arguably played a key role, but we certainly can’t be reductive/ignore: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/0…