The California Reparations Commission Fails State History

May 22, 2023 By Will Swaim 3 Comments

Its report erases the agency and success of black Californians and ignores how others worked with them to secure basic rights for all.

California’s reparations commission has determined that slavery, as opposed to disastrous policies advanced by the political establishment for decades, is the real reason for present-day black poverty in the state. In just a few weeks, the legislature that created the task force will take up the commission’s proposal, which calls for payments to black residents of upwards of $1.2 million.

As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in December, reading the 500 pages from the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans is like listening to Béla Bartók’s bloody Bluebeard’s Castle played on 100 kazoos.

Still, all anyone wants to talk about is the money, and for good reason — the commission proposes to create a nearly trillion-dollar fund from which qualifying African Americans may hope to receive million-dollar payments. The total cost is conservatively estimated at three times California’s annual budget.

Those sorts of eye-catching numbers have task-force supporters increasingly worried — perhaps especially Governor Gavin Newsom, whose signature created the commission that could imperil his White House ambitions. Now they’re trying to downplay the monetary awards, even acting a bit peeved that anyone would focus on something so mundane — so filthy — as mere money.

“Dealing with that legacy is about much more than cash payments,” Newsom said in a statement to Fox News. “The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country.”

Task-force members are equally coy.

“We want to make sure that this is presented out in a way that does not reinforce the preoccupation with a dollar figure, which is the least important piece of this,” said Cheryl Grills, a task-force member and clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “It’s really unfortunate. I’m actually sad to see that our news media is not able to nuance better. It’s almost like, ‘What’s going to be sensational’ as opposed to what’s important.”

What’s important, Grills and others say, is providing the public with an accurate record of slavery in California — slavery and its innumerable effects — and then getting California to issue a formal apology for what the task force calls the state’s “perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants.”

“Our history has been so buried, so erased, so denied. I think that is an essential element of our mission,” said Donald Tamaki, a task-force member and lawyer from San Francisco.

On that matter, says task-force member and state assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, the commission’s mission has been accomplished. His evidence: He said he has met “a few who have read the report, and it was eye-opening for them. For people who read the interim report, to hear them say ‘I didn’t know’ was probably the most gratifying thing I could hear.”

*   *   *

But on the more modest goal of documenting the history of black Californians, the commission has utterly failed. It actually erases the agency — the success — of black Californians throughout statehood. And the report ignores the ways in which Californians of all races and ethnicities have more often worked together to secure for all Californians unalienable human rights, among these the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As I wrote in the Journal:

Begin with this: Slavery in what’s now California was banned under Mexican authority in 1837. California joined the union in 1850 as a free state. The panel briefly acknowledges this only to dismiss it, lingering instead on the 1852 passage of the California Fugitive Slave Act, under which 13 people were deported from the state. The commission briefly mentions that the reviled law lapsed three years after being passed but doesn’t mention the numerous cases of white California officials—sheriffs, judges, attorneys and others—who discovered and liberated enslaved people.

The best known of these may be the story of Biddy Mason, an account I described in that piece.

Mason was one of several slaves brought to California by a Texas farmer in 1851. When Los Angeles County Sheriff David W. Alexander learned of their presence in San Bernardino, he gathered a mixed-race posse and rode 60 miles — up and over the windswept, nearly 4,000-foot Cajon Pass — to free Mason and the others. He brought them to a downtown Los Angeles courtroom where Judge Benjamin Hayes formally emancipated them. Remarkably, Mason went on to become one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest landowners, a merchant, midwife, and philanthropist.

Similarly, the commission touches on the case of Archy Lee, a 19-year-old black man brought to Sacramento in 1857 by his Mississippi master. Here’s how the commission reports Lee’s dramatic release from bondage:

But in one example, the case of Archy Lee from 1857 to 1858, the proslavery California Supreme Court made every effort to return him to enslavement. Lee’s enslaver, Charles Stovall, forced him to go with him to California years after the state fugitive slave law had expired. But California’s supreme court justices decided that since Stovall was a young man who suffered from constant illness, and he did not know about California’s laws, he should not be punished by losing his right to own Archy Lee. It took several more lawsuits by free Black Californians, and a new decision from a federal legal official, before Lee finally won permanent freedom. . . . After free Black activists successfully rescued Archy Lee from enslavement in 1858, angry proslavery legislators tried to make these anti-Black laws even worse.

Black Californians were indeed critical to Lee’s ultimate liberation. But much — in fact, almost everything — is missing from the commission’s version of events.

The curious might start with these questions: If California’s political establishment was so hostile to black Californians, how did “Black activists” manage the trick of “several more lawsuits” and the persuasion of “a federal legal official” to liberate Lee?

The answer: They did not act alone or without resources. One of those “Black activists” was Mary Ellen Pleasant, a millionaire, high-profile philanthropist, and abolitionist. When Lee escaped from Stovall, Pleasant gave him shelter and then helped finance two state cases that came before the state supreme court’s execrable decision to remand Lee to Stovall’s custody. Lee’s attorney throughout the ordeal was Edwin Crocker, a white man, and the chairman of California’s first Republican Party gathering, in 1856.

It was arguably the partnership of Crocker and Pleasant that kept Lee free and in California through the first state-court case and subsequent appeal. When the state supreme court asserted that Lee must be returned to Stovall, it was Crocker who persuaded T. W. Freelon, a (white) federal judge in San Francisco, to overturn the state high court’s stupid ruling. And when Stovall nevertheless attempted to kidnap Lee aboard the Orizaba, a ship anchored in San Francisco harbor, white policemen carried out a search to rescue Lee. They found and freed him. Stovall returned to Mississippi sans Lee. Perhaps shaken by his near miss or lured by gold fever, or both, Lee left California for British Columbia that same year.

But to acknowledge all of this would mean trouble for a government task force determined to find evidence of systemic violence against black Californians. Despite the commission’s bias, there were such Californians as Biddy Mason and Mary Ellen Pleasant — black, independent, and financially successful women. There were also white attorneys willing to fight for black freedom in a decade of national chaos in which the rights of black Americans were in flux. More important, there were white California officials — judges, police, and others — willing to enforce laws defending black Californians. Systematically ignoring this evidence is Orwellian, an official government endeavor designed to obscure history for momentary political gain. If successful, it will rob all Californians, including black Californians, of aspirational models of the hard work of freedom — and of hard work generally.

*   *   *

The commission’s childish and dangerous account of the case of Archy Lee is a masterpiece of academic rigor compared with its complete silence on the outsized role played by Californians in the Civil War itself.

Though California entered the Union a free state, Southern apologists never surrendered their hope of one day capturing the Golden State. These fantasists foresaw the creation of a vast slave empire, fueled by California gold and run through Pacific Ocean ports, stretching not just coast to coast but globally, too — south through Mexico, Central and South America, all the way to frigid Tierra del Fuego, and westward across the Pacific Ocean to grasp all of Asia.

When the Union blocked Southern ports in the summer of 1861, Richmond’s malignant California dream became an urgent military necessity. Confederate troops massing ominously in West Texas suddenly crossed that border, invading the New Mexico Territory and establishing a regional capital in Mesilla with an outpost farther west in Tucson. From that fortress town, the rebels began probing the desert path to California.

Set against Southern ambition, some 2,000 Californians volunteered for training at Camp Downey, in what’s now Oakland. This newly minted First California Volunteer Infantry, along with regular Army units, was shipped to Los Angeles and from there stepped off on a 900-mile march across Southern California’s hellish eastern deserts toward the Confederate Army. Water and food were scarce along the route. Just as formidable were the Apache Indians; fierce defenders of their historic lands, they were a constant threat to the Californians.

Still, they marched. On April 15, 1862, at Picacho Pass, 50 miles northwest of Tucson, twelve California scouts ran into ten rebel “pickets” — guards at the westernmost tip of the advancing Confederate Army. Their engagement was brief and deadly. Irish-born Californian lieutenant James Barrett led the attack, quickly capturing three Confederates and killing another. But when he had secured one of the prisoners and swung back onto his mount, Barrett was briefly in the range of a sharp-eyed rebel sniper. Shot through the neck, Barrett bled out on the spot. Two other Californians, Privates George Johnson and William Leonard, were shot and died nearby.

The retreating Confederate pickets carried news of the advancing California Column back to their outpost in Tucson; from there, the Confederates packed up and fled back to Texas.

The Battle of Picacho Pass ended the western advance of the most malignant force in the first American century. It ended the slaveholders’ dream of global empire. But that achievement left behind the dreams of three young Californians. Johnson was just 21, Leonard perhaps 26; their bodies were returned to California and buried at the San Francisco Presidio. Barrett’s body, reportedly buried in a shallow grave, was never found. In 1928, the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society and the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a monument, near U.S. 10, to recall their sacrifice in the “only battle of the Civil War fought in Arizona Territory.”

The California Column wasn’t unique. From a state population of just 380,000, more than 17,000 Californians joined the Union ranks — “the highest per-capita total for any state in the Union,” notes the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Fewer than 300 Californians left to join the Confederacy.

Few Americans today recall the Californians’ commitment. There is no mention of it in the state’s reparations report. Here as elsewhere, the commission’s report often speaks loudest in its silences.

*   *   *

One of those silences is the commission’s refusal to explain the voluntary, post–Civil War migration of millions of black Americans to California, including to Weed, a flourishing lumber town.

But Weed was eventually destroyed, and with it the prosperous black and other migrant families that built the town. It was destroyed not by slavers or white racists or “systemic racism.” It was destroyed by well-meaning but shortsighted liberal politicians — state and federal officials who linked arms with environmental activists and began squeezing the life out of the Northwest timber industry, including Weed. Blindly privileging such remarkable species as the spotted owl over the more common human person, California state and federal regulators locked down the forests.

This overregulation of California’s lumber industry was supposed to save the planet. Instead, it has done the opposite. It began with the gradual, ceaseless piling up of federal, state, and local regulations. The pile is now so large it is a kind of monument to human arrogance, a record of the government’s doomed effort to cover every eventuality, from “forest health, wildlife habitat, water and air quality, archeological sites, [and] land use patterns” to “respect for community sentiments,” as researchers put it in a 2005 study of the decline and fall of the California timber industry. Those “growing regulations have only created costlier sales, not ‘cleaner’ ones,” the researchers concluded. In the process, these programs undermined the wealth and opportunities of working Californians, including the black Californians about whom the commission says it is most concerned.

*   *   *

The reparations task force concluded that “American government at all levels, including in California, has historically criminalized African Americans for the purposes of social control and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor.” Yet progressive government itself is the enemy of disadvantaged Californians. Confronting these massive failures would bring the state task force face-to-face with its own fellow ideologues: government unions, environmental-justice warriors, and progressive government officials. I’ll call back one last time to my prior piece:

Take the state’s execrable public education system. California ranks dead last in the nation in literacy. Black children are the most brutalized [by] these failures: Only 10% meet math standards and about 30% achieve English competency. Yet as test scores fall, high school graduations rise. Denied a real education, many of these children will qualify only for low-level jobs and government assistance.

The commission calls this a “school-to-prison pipeline” and blames slavery.

But the problems clearly start in the schools. In the classroom, collective bargaining gives union leaders authority over teacher hiring and firing; they use this authority to reward loyalists, punish reformers, and move failing teachers into broken schools where overwhelmed poor parents are unlikely to notice.

Click here to read the full article at National Review

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California’s Reparations Scam: Michael Jackson’s Kids Would Get Payouts

May 18, 2023 By Horace Cooper 4 Comments

California’s reparations con game is like a Nigerian Prince email scam

In 2020 the California legislature passed AB 3121 which created a 9-person task force to study California’s “complicity in slavery.” The task force would also be authorized to make recommendations to the state legislature about payments – also known as reparations.

Even if one could prove the dubious theory that the economic state of Blacks today is a result of America’s legacy of slavery, the state of California wouldn’t be the first place or even the second place to focus on this slavery.  Since 1850 when California became a state its Constitution expressly forbid slavery, and it never supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

It turns out that though California didn’t promote slavery, today it is one of the places willing to entertain bad ideas, however.

Rather than focus on how California’s poor public schools have failed poor Blacks and white alike? Or how its anti-business regulatory climate has eroded the ability of its poorer residents to climb out of poverty and into the middle class, elites in the state have moved to distract disadvantaged voters with the reparations con.

This high-stakes con game will prove no more beneficial to Blacks in California than the typical recipients of the Nigerian Prince email scam.

The Reparations Task Force has already pledged that nearly 80 percent of California’s 2.6 million Black residents will be granted reparations. The task force cannot achieve this goal – even if it was legal, which it is not.

First, the math simply doesn’t work. Consider: if all of the ‘eligible’ Blacks in California were merely given $1000 in reparations the cost to California would exceed $2 billion.  But that compensation would in no way equal the staggering claims made by the racial alarmists that push for reparations. $1,000 would be a pittance of the injuries that they claim that blacks have faced in California.

Using questionable calculations that wouldn’t get a passing grade in junior high, the task force has estimated that the “compounded” injury to Blacks that have lived their entire lives in California would equal 100k for every year of their residency in the state.  Consider, for just one year of reparations using this measure, the state would be on the hook for $200 billion – out of a 300 billion state budget as of 2022.  The median age of Blacks in California is 36.5.  When you factor in that median age payouts equal nearly a trillion.  There is no scenario where this will occur.

Second, who should receive payments? Per the decision of the task force, only Blacks who are descendants of slavery are eligible. Persons born outside of the U.S. aren’t eligible. 

But should all others be eligible? What about Michael Jackson’s kids? Should his oldest son Michael “Prince” Joseph Jackson, Jr. receive a payment? Using the online calculator set up by the reparations task force he’d be eligible for a half a million payout. This despite there being no evidence that he has ever faced discrimination because he is the son of a black man. And the same is true for his siblings. Yet the task force would also award the three more than a cool million. In fact, the task force hasn’t set up any criteria other than race for eligibility. Has in fact every black descendant of slavery suffered injury? The task force says yes, but they present no evidence to prove their claims.

Merely being black is a sufficient basis for getting a payment per the task force.  But who is Black? Do recipients self-select and declare themselves black? Will California restore the odious “one drop rule” and decide that any black descendant is sufficient to make someone black? Alternatively, will the state of California use visual inspectors a la Plessy v Ferguson to sort out who is who? Or must recipients submit DNA samples to show their heritage?

Whatever method California adopts is fraught with danger. As a melting pot nation, black Americans have intermarried at higher and higher rates over the last 100 years and not every one of those children born of such unions identify as black.  Increasingly Americans of all stripes identify as other proving that forcing people to choose being only black is completely unworkable.

Finally, the task forces objectives are illegal. Courts are highly skeptical of any public policy effort that relies primarily on race to provide a benefit or detriment.  There was a time when “separate but equal” was the law of the land. But that ruling was overturned and today after a long line of rulings starting with Brown v. Board of Education, even modest raced-based policies are highly scrutinized.

Whatever method California adopts is fraught with danger. As a melting pot nation, black Americans have intermarried at higher and higher rates over the last 100 years and not every one of those children born of such unions identify as black.  Increasingly Americans of all stripes identify as other proving that forcing people to choose being only black is completely unworkable.

Finally, the task forces objectives are illegal. Courts are highly skeptical of any public policy effort that relies primarily on race to provide a benefit or detriment.  There was a time when “separate but equal” was the law of the land. But that ruling was overturned and today after a long line of rulings starting with Brown v. Board of Education, even modest raced-based policies are highly scrutinized.

Click here to read the full article in FoxNews

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Equity vs. Equality: California Reparations Commission Wants to Legalize Racial Discrimination

May 15, 2023 By Katy Grimes 4 Comments

Newsom-backed task force recommends nixing Proposition 209, which prohibits discrimination

“With a ‘Reparations Management Council’ to operate independent of the government of San Francisco, what could possibly go wrong?” the Globe asked earlier this week.

San Francisco resident Richie Greenberg has identified that the San Francisco Reparations Plan “installs a neo-Apartheid system on a city of 45,000 Black/African-American residents being given super-prioritized services, funding and extraordinary privilege – out of total city population of 825,000. The result is Apartheid San Francisco, where 5% Black residents take the resources and economic earnings of the 95% non-Black residents.”

As the Globe reported in January, both the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee and State Reparations Task Force are expanding reparations beyond slavery. It’s become a grab and hustle for all grievances. But where does this end?

Buckle up and hold on tightly – they said the quiet parts aloud: “the racial wealth gap in the state of California.”

As the Globe reported in December, Reparations task force member Jovan Scott Lewis said: “Spoiler-alert: We don’t yet know the racial wealth gap in the state of California.” This is the preliminary conversation to figure out what we know and what we don’t know.”

Remember this: “Racial wealth gap.”

Another task force member Dr. Cheryl Grills said: “Racial terror leads to racial trauma … also known as race-based traumatic stress.”

Fox News now reports that the statewide California Reparations Task Force, created by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, formally recommended that the state legislature repeal Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment that prohibits the government from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, someone based on their race.

Proposition 209, a ban on affirmative action, was passed by California voters in 1996, and prohibits discrimination or preferential treatment by the state, public universities, public employment, or other public entities, and banned affirmative action policies.

In 2020, voters even reaffirmed the ban on affirmative action policies and practices by voting down Proposition 16, 57% to 42%. Prop. 16 qualified for the ballot when ACA 5, authored by then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), was passed by the California legislature in 2020. If passed, Prop. 16 would have repealed Proposition 209.

Imagine the coincidence that the statewide reparations committee is the result of legislation also authored by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), Assembly Bill 3121, passed in 2021.

So it now appears that the California Reparations Task Force has taken up the affirmative action mantle and will backdoor granting preferential treatment based on race via their final recommendations to the California Legislature.

However, as we reported in January, both the San Francisco and state Reparations committees are seriously neglecting the state’s rich ethnic history, favoring race hustling instead.

A local historian friend sent this:

“Before and during the Civil War militia companies were ethnic, generally social groups with others from the ‘old country’ such as German, Irish, and Italian companies all over northern California. This was not then considered segregation, it was a place to socialize with those of similar backgrounds. Sacramento had a black militia company in that era. Many from those units joined the California Volunteers and fought in the eastern battles.
In the [Sacramento] Land Park area (there is a monument marker in the park) was Camp Union Sutterville where seven regiments of infantry, two regiments of cavalry, and smaller specialized units were trained and participated primarily in two Union moves. One was to replace regular army troops in the west and they garrisoned posts all the way to Salt Lake City, founding an army base in that area that is still active. The other went to southern California and joined units raised in that area. Confederates had occupied what is now Arizona and New Mexico up to the California border. Camp Union troops were involved with pushing them back into Texas and when the war ended Sacramento troops were well established in that state.”

Every kid in California should know this.

As Fox reported:

“The [statewide reparations] task force highlights a study commissioned by the far-left Equal Justice Society, an organization of which a task force member is president, that concluded between $1 billion and $1.1 billion in contract dollars were lost annually by businesses owned by women and people of color due to Proposition 209. The task force’s report also argued admissions declined for Black applicants ‘at every campus.’”

“According to UCLA law professor Richard Sander, however, the number of Black graduates from the University of California had risen 70% above pre-Proposition 209 levels by 2017. That same year, he wrote, the number of STEM graduates rose from an annual average of around 200 before Proposition 209 to 510. The figure increased to 558 in 2018.”

“It is unclear how repealing a measure that bars discrimination or preferential treatment based on race would help combat racial discrimination,” Fox concluded. Indeed.

This topic isn’t going away, and the left isn’t giving up. A bill last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and 52 House Democrats sought reparations and a national apology for slavery. They are still pushing to set up a commission to “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies,” the New York Post reported.

As the Globe reported in December, the state Reparations Task Force is already pulling a bait-and-switch on Californians –  with talk of a “racial wealth gap,” “racial terror,” “race-based traumatic stress,” and “guaranteed income for dependents of slaves.” But what they are really promoting is social justice reparations and nothing more than a redistribution of wealth.

California has very serious problems that lawmakers seem disinterested in fixing:

  • California is home to one-third of the nations’ welfare recipients and has the highest poverty;
  • Our failing schools now rank 48th in the country;
  • California lawmakers can’t build new homes or apartments for less than $800,000 each (luxury level costs);
  • The governor and lawmakers can’t figure out what to do with several hundred thousand drug-addicted, mentally ill homeless vagrants living on city streets and taking over public parks;
  • California lawmakers refuse to build additional reservoirs for water storage in a state in which drought conditions are historically normal, and now has a regular wildfire “season;”
  • California lawmakers and governor mandated all electric vehicles within a few years, but can’t keep the power on during heat spells and winter storms;
  • Lawmakers authorized more than $25 million worth of taxpayer-funded guaranteed income to some individuals in the state, but can’t really tell you why.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

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California Reparations Task Force to Recommend ‘Down Payments’ for Slavery, Racism 

May 3, 2023 By Wendy Fry 12 Comments

The California Reparations Task Force published documents Monday indicating it plans to recommend the state apologize for racism and slavery and consider “down payments” of varying amounts to eligible African American residents. 

The documents, numbering more than 500 pages, do not contain an overall price tag for reparations, but they do include ways the state could calculate how much money African Americans in California have lost since 1850, when the state was established, through today due to certain government practices. 

The loss calculations would vary depending on type of racial harm and how long a person has lived in California. The loss estimates range from $2,300 per person per year of residence for the over-policing of Black communities, to $77,000 total per person for Black-owned business losses and devaluations over the years. 

The state-appointed task force faces a July 1 deadline to make reparations recommendations to the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Task force leaders have said they expect the Legislature to come up with actual reparations amounts.

The task force also is recommending a variety of policy changes to counteract discrimination. 

“It is critical that we compensate, but not just compensate. We also need to evaluate policy that continues to hold us back,” said Monica Montgomery Steppe, a San Diego city council member who is on the task force. She spoke at a “listening session” in San Diego Saturday. 

Who would get reparations?

The task force documents discuss two kinds of reparations: those arising from particular instances of discrimination or harm that require an individual to file a claim, and those that involve distributing money or benefits to all eligible Black Californians for racial harm the entire community experienced. 

A recent example of an individual claim was Bruce’s Beach, a beachfront property and resort that the city of Manhattan Beach seized from a Black family nearly 100 years ago. Recently, partly because of the task force, government leaders returned the land deed to descendants of the Bruce family, who re-sold it to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

It is one of the few times a Black family was restored property taken by a local government.

“It is critical that we compensate, but not just compensate. We also need to evaluate policy that continues to hold us back.” MONICA MONTGOMERY STEPPE, REPARATIONS TASK FORCE AND SAN DIEGO CITY COUNCIL MEMBER

Eligibility for reparations continues to be a controversy. The task force in March 2022 voted to limit potential compensation to descendants of free and enslaved Black people who were in the United States in the 19th century. The group narrowly rejected a proposal to include all Black people, including recent immigrants, regardless of lineage.

Everyone in the eligible class should be compensated, the task force report says, even if they can’t prove they suffered a specific harm. 

“The State of California created laws and policies discriminating against and subjugating free and enslaved African Americans and their descendants,” the report says. “In doing so, these discriminatory policies made no distinctions between these individuals; the compensatory remedy must do the same.” 

The final report, much like the task force’s previous interim report, lays out the history of systemic racism and ongoing injustices in California.

Costs of racial damage

The latest batch of documents also urges that eligible people be compensated in cash, sooner rather than later. The records instruct the Legislature to begin with “down payments” rather than waiting for full loss calculations. 

The final report suggests dollar figures for certain categories of racial damage: 

  • For mass incarceration and the over-policing of Black communities, it estimates a loss per person of $115,260, or $2,352 for each year they lived in California from 1971 to 2020, corresponding to the national War on Drugs.
  • For housing discrimination, it offers two methods of loss calculation. One method based on gaps between Black and white “housing wealth” would peg losses at $145,847 per person. The other method, based on governments’ “redlining” history, including discriminatory lending and zoning, would calculate Black residents’ losses at $148,099 per person — or $3,366 for each year they lived in California from 1933 to 1977.
  • For injustices and discrimination in health, it estimates $13,619 per person for each year lived in California, or $966,921 total for someone living about 71 years — the average life expectancy of Black residents in California in 2021. 

The reparations program would be overseen by a new state agency that would determine eligibility and distribute funds, the report says. The agency also would be responsible for helping individuals document and provide evidence for specific injustices. 

Eligible Black residents should not expect cash payments anytime soon. The state Legislature and Newsom will decide whether any reparations are paid, and it’s unclear what they will do with the task force recommendations. 

“This is the time where we really need the voice of the public,” said Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad, also known as Friday Jones, a member of Los Angeles’ reparations advisory commission. “This is the time to get your churches together. This is the time to get your school boards together.” 

Jones made the comments during the listening session in San Diego.

Non-cash reparations

Some task force members have been dismayed at the amount of attention paid to the  dollar figures under discussion. The final report provides dozens of policy recommendations aimed at preventing further discrimination and harm against Black residents. 

“The biggest fight is implementation of all these recommendations, “ Montgomery Steppe said. “After the task force issues its final report, those recommendations need strong support in California’s Legislature and the government. It will take all hands on deck to ensure we push for a policy change from our state legislature.” 

The task force is scheduled to meet again at 9 a.m. Saturday at Lisser Hall at Northeastern University, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., in Oakland. The meeting will be live streamed. 

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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Reparations for Black Californians Could Top $800 Billion

March 30, 2023 By Janie Har 11 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span. Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the calculations. The reparations task force met Wednesday to discuss the numbers and can vote to adopt the suggestions or come up with its own figures. The proposed calculations and figures come from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” said Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. He’s one of two lawmakers on the task force responsible for mustering support from state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In an interview prior to the meeting, Jones-Sawyer said he needed to consult budget analysts and others before deciding whether the scale of payments is feasible.

The estimates aren’t new. They came up in a September presentation as the consulting team sought guidance on whether to calculate damages using a national or California-specific model.

But the task force must now settle on a cash amount as it nears a July 1 deadline to recommend to lawmakers how California can atone for its role in perpetuating racist systems that continue to undermine Black people. The final decision rests with the state government.

For those who support reparations, the staggering $800 billion estimate underscores the long-lasting harm Black Americans have endured, even in a state that never officially endorsed slavery.

Several people who gave public comment Wednesday spoke of the urgent need to pay Black Americans for all that was taken from them.

“My family came from the South because they were running for their lives, they were fearful of being lynched, just for voting,” said Charlton Curry of Sacramento, California, who discusses reparations on his Big C Sports podcast.

“Cash payments are necessary. Money talks,” he said, noting that white people benefited from free U.S. government land through the 1862 Homestead Act, and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II and Jewish Holocaust victims received reparations.

Critics pin their opposition partly on the fact that California was never a slave state and say current taxpayers should not be responsible for damage linked to events that germinated hundreds of years ago.

Bob Woodson, a prominent Black conservative, calls reparations impractical, controversial and counterproductive.

“No amount of money could ever ‘make right’ the evil of slavery, and it is insulting to suggest that it could,” he said in an email to The Associated Press, adding that Black communities relied on faith and family to build thriving communities following slavery. “Some of these communities only began coming apart after we lost sight of these values, which also hold the key to these communities’ restoration.”

Financial redress is just one part of the package being considered. Other proposals include paying incarcerated inmates market value for their labor, establishing free wellness centers and planting more trees in Black communities, banning cash bail, and adopting a K-12 Black studies curriculum.

Reparations talks are stalled at the federal level, but the idea flourished in California as well as U.S. cities and counties following the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the reparations task force.

An advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals. Supervisors expressed general support, but stopped short of endorsing specific proposals. They’ll take up the issue later this year.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday said from Ghana that she and President Joe Biden support a reparations study, but the president has so far sidestepped calls from advocates to create a federal commission.

The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution in the “war on drugs” from 1970 to 2020. That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

The numbers are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans. That would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident from 1933 to 1977. The $569 billion is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million Californians who identify as Black would be eligible.

But they won’t all be. People must meet residency and other requirements for monetary compensation. They also must be descendants of enslaved and freed Black people in the U.S. as of the 19th century, which leaves out Black immigrants.

Click here to read the full article in AP News

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Column: Reparations Plans Move Ahead. Will the Money and Political Support Be There?

March 20, 2023 By Michael Smolensk 8 Comments

The price tag on recent proposals to compensate Black residents for the sin of slavery and its continuing impacts have heightened debate over reparations

The movement to morally and financially atone for slavery and its related impacts over generations is running into harsh fiscal and political realities.

The concept of reparations has come into sharper focus now that big dollar figures have been attached to it, particularly the proposal by a San Francisco committee that every eligible Black person in the city receive a $5 million payment.

A statewide panel is contemplating payments to a more defined group of Black residents that could total $640 billion, or $360,000 for each eligible person in California.

Such price tags would be controversial anytime, but more so now as California faces a $22.5 billion budget shortfall this year and cities are projecting deficits.

Even before such figures surfaced, polls found that paying reparations did not have broad political support.

But the evil of slavery and subsequent policies that have damaged African Americans both economically and physically have been such that that the question arises: Should politics and costs matter?

Some proponents of reparations have said when judges and juries determine victims must be compensated, the amount is based on an assessment of the harm done, not necessarily the financial wherewithal of who did it.

But the fiscal impact on states and cities and their populations will be an inescapable part of the equation. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University estimated the San Francisco proposal would cost the equivalent of $600,000 for each non-Black family in the city.

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors embraced the city reparations panel’s report of more than 100 recommendations, which includes the $5 million payment, though some members expressed concern about the costs. The board did not take action on the specific proposals, which it plans to do later this year after further analysis.

The debate over reparations has been wide ranging.

Critics often say people who weren’t slave owners shouldn’t have to pay people who weren’t enslaved. In California, some opponents question why payments should be made in a state or city that didn’t enslave Black people.

Proponents of reparations point to a history that shows long after slavery was abolished in 1865, unfettered freedom for Blacks was hard to come by. Beyond Jim Crow laws in the South, government policies and practices led to imprisonment of Black people at higher rates, denial of home and business loans and restrictions on where they could live and work. That includes California.

Slavery was key to generating wealth in the United States.

“. . . by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author who has written about reparations, citing historian Edward Baptist before a congressional committee.

“By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: $3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.”

San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio was among those who voiced concern about whether the city can afford the proposals, but supported some form of reparations. He said some of the city’s neighborhoods used to be hostile to potential homebuyers who were Black, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, including legendary Giants center fielder Willie Mays, who had been rejected when he attempted to buy a home in 1957.

“Generations of Black families were denied the transfer of wealth that White families benefit from as their homes increase in value,” Engardio said at Tuesday’s hearing. “Many people who inherit a west side home today could not afford it on their own, but they get to stay in San Francisco because their grandparents were allowed to buy homes when it was cheap.”

That story can be repeated across the United States.

Legislation seeking reparations for Black Americans has been introduced regularly in Congress since at least 1989, but has gone nowhere. Momentum in mostly liberal states picked up amid the Black Lives Matter movement that grew after a White Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, on May 25, 2020.

Later that year, then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber of San Diego, now California’s secretary of state, carried a successful bill to create the nation’s first statewide reparations panel. In 2021, Evanston, Ill., became the first U.S. city to commit to reparations — using tax money from recreational marijuana sales to pay $10 million over a decade with the distribution of $400,000 to eligible Black households.

Former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, spoke of the difficulty in enacting reparations nationwide on a podcast with Bruce Springsteen,”Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.,” in 2021.

“So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country, was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.

“What I saw during my presidency was the politics of White resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action… all that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program… as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counterproductive.”

In 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 3 in 10 U.S. adults said some form of payment should be made to descendants of enslaved people. The concept was opposed by all groups surveyed regardless of age, economic status, education or race — save one: Seventy-seven percent of Black respondents favored such reparations. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were split, 49 percent opposed and 48 percent in favor.

In a surprise, the NAACP San Francisco chapter on Tuesday opposed the proposed $5 million payment and many of the other panel recommendations. Instead, the organization suggested broad and lasting investments in housing, jobs, education and health care targeted to improve the lives of Black residents.

Click here to read the full article at the SD Diego Union Tribune

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California Weighs $360,000 in Reparations to Eligible Black Residents. Will Others Follow?

March 5, 2023 By Karen Breslau and Kelsey Butler 18 Comments

California is moving closer to determining what eligible Black residents are owed for generations of discriminatory practices, a key step toward potentially becoming the largest US jurisdiction to pay out billions of dollars in reparations.

The California Reparations Task Force will meet over the next two days in Sacramento to assess how reparations should be distributed, which could include direct payments and investments in education, health care and homeownership for Black communities. The group is set to deliver its final recommendations to the state legislature by July 1 and it will be up to lawmakers to decide whether to adopt them.

Tackling the issue is a complex task for the group of civil rights leaders, policymakers, economists and scholars appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. One of the models under consideration suggests the state would owe a total of almost $640 billion to 1.8 million Black Californians with an ancestor enslaved in the US, which works out to roughly $360,000 per person.

California’s task force has yet to say who would pay these sums. After years of budget surpluses, the state’s financial fortunes are turning, with a projected $22.5 billion budget deficit. The technology sector is laying off workers, stock market declines are hurting the incomes of top earners who pay a large share of taxes, and the state already has some of the highest taxes in the nation.

Read More: The Historical Reasons Behind U.S. Racial Wealth Gap

With a federal reparations bill languishing in Congress, how the outcome plays out in the most-populous US state may have implications for other areas that are weighing similar efforts across the country. Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first US city to provide reparations to its Black residents, including giving housing grants, and reparations studies are springing up in places like New York and St. Louis.

“If California can admit its sins and change the narrative, then there is a way forward for states and cities across the nation,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who wrote the bill creating the task force when she served in the state assembly.

One of the most difficult questions the task force faces is how to define the historical period for measuring harms experienced by Black residents in a state where slavery was never legal. And they’ll need to show how the reparations and policy changes will reduce the persistent racial wealth gap, which has left US White families with roughly six times more wealth than Black families. 

Read More: How Reparations Fit Into New Push for Racial Justice

A prevailing method is to use the racial wealth gap as an indicator of the losses that Black descendants of enslaved people suffered, according to an interim report by a working group for the task force. Using that model, a conservative estimate would be the state owed $636.7 billion. 

Another proposed strategy would be to calculate damages related to various injustices, including housing discrimination, mass incarceration, over-policing, health harms, devaluation of businesses, and property seizures.

The chair of California’s panel, Kamilah Moore, earlier this year tweeted a news story recounting proposals to fund reparations that included adding mansion or estate levies or offering tax credits.

Some California cities, including Los Angeles, have started their own reparations task forces outside of the state effort. In San Francisco, one notable proposal involves a $5 million lump-sum payment to each eligible Black resident. In a recent win for repatriation advocates, Los Angeles County returned the deed to a prime Southern California beach front property that had been forcibly taken from a Black couple a century ago. The descendants of the owners have now decided to sell the property back to the county for almost $20 million.

“These local initiatives are extremely important to start a conversation,” said Thomas Craemer, associate professor of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut, who consults with the California task force on economic methodology. “The past is the past. But we can start a conversation about it by making a down payment and then addressing what other injustices happened.” 

The issue of reparations has divided public opinion. About three-quarters of Black Americans say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, while only 18% percent of White Americans feel the same way, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Click here to read the full article in Bloomberg

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San Francisco Reparations Committee Admits $5 Million Payment Has No Basis

March 3, 2023 By Evan Symon 4 Comments

‘The Committee’s credibility sunk to a new low today’

The San Francisco reparations committee announced on Tuesday that the controversial one time payment of $5 million per black resident’ reparations figure proposed in January has not mathematical basis, and is instead based on “what could represent a significant enough investment.”

In the last few years following the George Floyd incident, reparations proposals for African-Americans have popped up across the United States. Statewide, a Reparations Task Force was approved by the Legislature and Governor in the summer of 2020 and has been meeting ever since to create a recommendation on what reparations could be for Californians whose ancestors were slaves in the US before 1865. Last year, the task force limited the reparation proposal to descendants of slaves only instead of all black Californians, called for reparations to be given despite California being a free-state since it’s inception, and estimated that $569 billion is owed to black Californians.

With a looming deadline, the Task Force is struggling on eligibility requirements, compensation calculation, and numerous other issues. May have noted that even if a recommendation is formulated, there will be numerous legislative challenges, legal challenges, and other hurdles that would likely end any future reparations plans.

However, while the Reparations Task Force has been working on a statewide proposal, San Francisco formed their own committee, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee. Since being founded in 2020, the Committee has worked on what citywide reparations could possibly look like. As of Wednesday, the Committee currently defines those eligible in the city as being 18 or older, being listed as black or African-American on public documents for at least the past decades, and two or more of the following:

  • Having been born or migrating to the city between 1940 and 1996 as well as showing proof of at least 13 years of residency
  • Having been incarcerated due to the war on drugs or being the direct descendant of someone who was
  • Being a descendant of someone who was enslaved before 1865
  • Having been displaced between 1954 and 1973 or being a descendant of someone who did
  • Being part of a marginalized group who experienced lending discrimination in the city between 1937 and 1968 or in formerly redlined communities within the city between 1968 and 2008

While housing funds, job creation, and other benefits have been discussed as reparations within the city, the Committee recommended a controversial one-time $5 million payment per qualified black resident in January. The figure generated widespread criticism in San Francisco and across the country, with the Committee defending the figure by saying that the payment “would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.”

Opponents pressed Committee members on how the figure was formulated and on what metrics they were using. Many compared it to the state plan and how open they were being with their process.

“The Task Force’s initial ‘$569 billion’ figure at least tried to show their work,” said legal adviser Richard Weaver to the Globe on Wednesday. “They based it on the housing wealth gap and how much black residents lost in the past due to different polices. Flawed? Very much so. Passable in the Legislature? Not with California’s budget. Laughable? Yes. But they at least showed how they came up with it.  They showed their work.”

“San Francisco on the other hand has been shady. It’s good that they nailed down who exactly would be eligible in the proposal, but they never said how they arrived at that $5 million figure. It always seemed like too round a figure.”

“There wasn’t a math formula”

The figure was immediately lambasted, with local lawmakers explaining that the city did not have the money for such a reparations plan and would have to severely cut into city services or raise taxes to make it happen. However, the estimated figure remained. After weeks of demands by city residents, Committee Chairman Eric McDonnell finally revealed how the figure was calculated on Tuesday. According to McDonnell, it wasn’t.

“There wasn’t a math formula,” said McDonnell in a Washington Post interview. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

The remark brought considerable outrage on Tuesday and Wednesday. While committee members attempted to defend it, saying that a price tag couldn’t be put on the horrors of slavery and discrimination, many simply noted that there was no justification behind the figure and failed  to even try to give a basic estimate overview.

“This is just a bunch of like-minded people who got in the room and came up with a number,” said San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis. “You’ll notice in that report, there was no justification for the number, no analysis provided. This was an opportunity to do some serious work and they blew it.”

Others noted on Wednesday that support for reparations in the city has begun to evaporate even more as a result.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

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Task Force Meets in San Diego, Debates Eligibility for California Slavery and Racism Reparations

January 29, 2023 By Greg Moran 9 Comments

The task force is charged with making recommendations to the legislature by June on reparations for the effects of slavery and systemic racism for Black people in the state

A state task force charged with studying and making recommendations for reparations to Black residents of California who have suffered harm from the effects of slavery and systemic racism met in San Diego Friday and discussed at length who would be eligible.

The meeting, which continues Saturday at the Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center at the SDSU campus, comes less than six months before the task force is to issue its final conclusions.

The task force of nine members, including San Diego City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe, has been meeting regularly for the past 18 months around the state. The work is complicated and extensive: an interim report issued in June runs to nearly 500 pages. It is also groundbreaking, the first time any state in the country has tackled the issue of historical reparations for Black citizens.

The task force has already made some key decisions. The biggest, in March, was to determine that eligibility for any future payment would be limited to Black state residents who are descendants of enslaved people, or of a free Black person living in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century.

That standard would exclude some individuals, such as Black people who came to the U.S. after the end of the 19th century.

Among other issues the task force is hashing out, economists are attempting to quantify the economic losses stemming from redlining, mass incarceration, environmental harm, and other categories.

The task force is also expected to recommend non-monetary steps the state should take. These could include issuing a formal apology from the state, and deleting language in the state constitution that prohibits slavery, or involuntary servitude, except to punish a crime. That allows prisoners in the state to be paid low wages, advocates say.

The task force was created under Assembly Bill 3121, a bill authored by then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego. Now Secretary of State, Weber addressed the task force at the start of the meeting, urging them to finish the work on time. “If you don’t push it forward, it loses momentum,” she said.

Click here to read the full article in the San Diego Union Tribune

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$5 Million for Each Longtime Black Resident? S.F. Has a Bold Reparations Plan to Consider

January 17, 2023 By Justin Phillips 10 Comments

A century after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and lamented how “the Negro still is not free.”

“One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” he said during his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

King could have been describing today’s San Francisco, a 47-square-mile city that’s home to more than 60 billionaires and at least 7,000 homeless people, around 40% of whom are Black, despite Black people representing only 5% of the population.

Right up until he was assassinated in 1968, King argued that economic justice was integral to racial justice. The idea is at the core of a draft proposal the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee presented to city leaders last month.

The Board of Supervisors created the committee, also called AARAC, in December 2020, amid a national racial reckoning. The board’s legislation, while innovative, was also narrow, allowing city leaders to reject or outright ignore the committee’s work.

What happens next will show whether San Francisco politicians are serious about confronting the city’s checkered past, or are simply pretending to be.

While California was never officially a slave state, slaveholders were protected here, and the committee’s research reveals that segregation, systemic oppression and racial prejudice born from the institution of slavery had a profound impact on the city’s evolution.

In the 20th century alone, San Francisco was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, barred Black people from settling in certain areas, kept them out of city jobs and demolished the Fillmore, a Black neighborhood and commercial district, leaving it vacant for decades.

“Centuries of harm and destruction of Black lives, Black bodies and Black communities should be met with centuries of repair,” AARAC chair Eric McDonnell told me. “If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.”

AARAC’s draft proposal includes a number of financial recommendations. There’s one that will especially get folks talking.

AARAC calls for one-time, lump-sum reparations payments of $5 million to each eligible recipient. The amount could cover the “the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy,” the draft states.

To qualify for the payments, residents must be 18 at the time the committee’s proposal is enacted, and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years. They may also have to prove they were born in the city between 1940 and 1996, have resided in San Francisco for at least 13 years, and be someone, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated during the war on drugs.

To put that in perspective, the state reparations task force, which will issue its own proposal is June, believes that Black Californians may be due $569 billion for housing discrimination alone between 1933 and 1977.

The wealth disparity is not the result of bad fortune. The period of urban renewal that began in the 1950s remains one of the most damning examples of how local government stole wealth from Black communities by razing them, and then ensured they never recovered. As AARAC’s report highlights, most of San Francisco’s formerly redlined neighborhoods — where residents were deemed ineligible for federal housing loans between 1933 and 1954 — are low-income neighborhoods undergoing gentrification now.

While San Francisco isn’t unique in having systematically distributed its riches along racial lines, the city’s status as a liberal bastion makes it a powerful testing ground for undoing these damages, AARAC vice chair Tinisch Hollins told me.

“This reparations process gives us a chance to look at the many ways, not just economically, that harm can and should be repaired,” Hollins said. “And even though San Francisco has passed policies that touch on the legacy of slavery, we have needed something that goes toward quantifying that harm.”

As for next steps, the committee will submit its final proposal to city leaders in June. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin told me he hopes his colleagues will approve AARAC’s recommendations.

“There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf,” Peskin said. “We cannot let this be one of them.”

As King described in his “I Have a Dream” speech, America was founded by white men who wrote a fraudulent “check” that promised that all men would enjoy the “unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

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