Asian American Studies Across the Disciplines Speaker Series
“Don’t Tax Me, Bro”: Deregulation and the Making of a Ghetto Tax in Post-Civil Rights America, 1980 to 2008 Dr. Devin Fergus “Don’t Tax Me, Bro” explores a generation of deregulatory policies that have silently eroded consumer protections while simultaneously advancing fringe financial services in areas—housing, employment, transportation, education—that have historically served as traditional pathways to upward mobility in the United States. Dr. Fergus consider the persistence of a ghetto tax, a cryptic collection of fees and charges paid regularly by quarantined consumers who are frequently cordoned off by race, gender, age, geography and class, as a key but little discussed mechanism in exacerbating the wealth gap over the last generation. Dr. Devin Fergus is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University and Senior Fellow at Demos. His book Land of the Fee will be published by Oxford University Press. This presentation is a guest lecture in the course Ethnic Economies and Globalization at the University of Pennsylvania.