While a House Republican proposal to tax the tuition waivers of graduate students may not be among the highest-profile Trump-era assaults on people of color, it represents a serious threat to racial equality. If included in the final tax plan, it would disproportionately harm nonwhite graduate students and be disastrous for the already dismal diversity of academia, putting an additional roadblock between people of color and the ivory tower and depriving all of us of their desperately needed intellectual contributions.

If graduate students were to be taxed on free tuition valued at tens of thousands of dollars, the bulk of their small stipends would have to go to pay tuition tax, rendering doctoral education inaccessible for all but the independently wealthy. Though the Senate tax plan thankfully does not appear to include a proposal of this kind, the House plan to tax graduate students like me — not just on the modest stipends we receive in exchange for being the backbone of university teaching workforces, but also on the free tuition we receive — would be ruinous.

It is obscene that Republican members of Congress are even considering shifting a tax burden off the likes of Donald Trump and his heirs and onto overworked, underpaid and sometimes even homeless graduate students. The effects of this tax would be overly felt by students of color, who already face too many barriers to entering the American academy. The result: Academia would become whiter and less inclusive than it already is. And what it already is, frankly, is shameful.

“On average, 75 out of every 100 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are white,” The Chronicle of Higher Education found last year after evaluating 400,000 professors at 1,500 colleges, adding that just “five are black, and even fewer are Hispanic.” (This disparity grows only worse when you look at tenured faculty members: 79 percent are white, and only 4 percent are black.) Such a racially monolithic faculty is woefully underprepared to teach a future student population, given that most United States newborn babies are now nonwhite, and there are already some freshman classes, such as at Harvard, that are majority nonwhite.